Melissa Stein has been chosen as the winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize by this year’s judge Mark Doty for her manuscript Rough Honey.

Melissa Stein’s poems have appeared in Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, North American Review, Indiana Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Djerassi Foundation. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.

Rough Honey is suffused with a dark tenderness. These poems speak of fragility and power, the contradictions of pleasure, the bruises we bear. With remarkable range, they carry us from a whitewater rafting calamity to the “torrents of wheat” on a family farm; from a bathysphere’s color-starved depths to a butcher’s blood-soaked counter; from a peepshow’s “manageable storm of boredom and sex” to a passionate fall from grace in an orchard. By turns buoyant and forlorn, Rough Honey’s characters both long for and abandon hope of true connection, of home, in a world where “everything is rented.” But their struggles are rendered in language so radiant and—yes—mellifluous it can’t help but hint at the possibility of transcendence, the sheer sweetness in being alive.