"The poems of Houstonian and Tuscaloosa, Alabama-born poet, author, podcast host and professor Melissa Studdard have been described as both “light and heavy, all at once”—likened to paintings and magic tricks. Her poems reimagine both the ordinary and the tragic as an extraordinary surrealistic scene, much the way ribbons, washes and spirals of luminous, flickering green and/or purple and/or red that we call the Southern Lights transform any landscape. 

"Studdard has been compared to Neruda, Whitman and the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. Her defiant poems embrace magical realism and fearlessly break contemporary literary taboo with their dream sequences and stubbornly passionate optimism." -  Chivas Sandage.