Additional information
by Melissa Balmain (Author)
"If the LOLSOB emoji could write verse that both sings and stings, the result would be Satan Talks to His Therapist."
--Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman
In Satan Talks to His Therapist, Melissa Balmain explores the lighter side of dark times. Playful yet poignant, her poems perfectly capture our human fallibility and comedic sense of importance.
"Balmain treads that fine line between comedy and tragedy in poems graced by telling details, surprising turns, and a keen sense of the absurd ... Satan Talks to His Therapist is a serious book that's very funny, and Melissa Balmain's gift is being able to tilt toward humor without losing the ache beneath the laughter."
--Literary Matters"It turns out that the literary establishment can't quite kill off humorous poetry. Melissa Balmain's Satan Talks to His Therapist is a marvel in the tradition of Martial, Jonathan Swift, and Dorothy Parker and the more recent generation of poets that includes Wendy Cope, X.J. Kennedy, and R.S. Gwynn. It is poetry you will enjoy--and enjoy giving to a friend who needs to see some humor in a world desperate for the medicine of laughter."
--A.M. Juster, author of Wonder & Wrath
Author Biography
Melissa Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America's longest-running journal of comic verse. Her poems and prose have appeared in such places as The American Bystander, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and The Washington Post. Balmain is the author of two previous poetry collections, Walking in on People (chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award) and The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults, as well as a travel memoir. A member of the University of Rochester's English Department since 2010, she lives nearby with her husband and (for now) one of their two children. She is a recovering mime.
