Dear Selection Committee
Jackleg Press
$13.04
You can purchase a copy here.
Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider
Melissa Studdard’s Dear Selection Committee
Memo to File: a must-read candidate
Thank you for your application. We’ll be in touch soon….
While waiting, pick up a copy of Melissa Studdard’s Dear Selection Committee for never has the dreaded, formulaic, and regularly unoriginal job application and wholly ambiguous and often soul-crushing interview and hiring process been so much fun. Structured as a job search, Dear Selection Committee packages and presents the sterile and generic process in an entirely unconventional and deeply authentic forty-four poem volume.
The collection takes the shape of an unnamed job seeker’s application process and doesn’t skip an email, follow-up request, or beat (yet continues to beat and reshape the way the process itself is both presented and contemplated). Studdard is both fearless and a fierce truth seeker who is unafraid of challenging conventionality. The text is a bold, “take me as I am” and “not as you wish me to be” statement that works to dismantle while also pushing for new ways of thinking, being, and doing.
The work opens with a prose poem and cover letter (titled “Dear Selection Committee”) which serves as both an anchor and a guide for the collection, with the remainder of the volume broken down into two parts (Interview and Application), with nine subsections (each mirroring a step, stage, or component of what we’ve been groomed to believe is a typical process) in each. The poems within each subsection speak to the associated step and the larger application process in ways that are deeply funny, brilliantly bold, and conversationally revealing.
Dear Selection Committee is a wildly fantastic take on how to magnify voices and experiences rarely offered a proper seat at the recruitment or reality table. Through its satire on the job application, the collection takes on serious themes including taboo topics often imposed upon the woman’s body (for example, “The Heart is a Muscular Organ,” ”, “Did I Do, O God, Did I As I Said I’d Do? Good! I Did.”, “Planted My Shame in the Backyard,” and “When My Lover Says Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.”
See,
“Did I Do, O God, Did I As I Said I’d Do? Good I Did!”
between my thighs
where my love is always required
where the dark bell forgot how to sleep”
and
from “When My Lover Says Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia”
I say, it’s not fear that matters, but where
you bury it. So he buries his
tongue inside me, and I tell him that sometimes I’m more afraid
of hearing what I know
than knowing it.”
With a sharp edge (and sharper pen) in combination with tremendous wit, Studdard gives everything and holds back nothing while calling out deeply problematic systems, norms, and realities, especially those faced by women. The pieces play internally as much as they do with their place in the larger collection. The poems are richly textured with strong, often surprising imagery that expands far beyond the life cycle of the typical job application.
For example, in “Hurricane, 3rd Day”, grouped in the “List Obstacles and Challenges You’ve Faced, and if Applicable, How You Overcame Them” subsection –
We hid in the belly of porcelain. The world
sang sirens overlapping, the sound of wind
taking gates from the hinge. That whistling, yes,
Whistling and whipping, the world the cry
of a cow caught in the spin of a twister and lifted,
Water creeping to the back door like a thief
and in “When I Say What for the Tenth Time in an Hour, You Ask if I Know What Happened to Beethoven’s Hearing”, grouped in the “Will You Need Any Special Accommodations or Supplies?” subsection –
and I say maybe it was a little Violet-backed Starling
flew into his ear and got trapped and all he could hear
after that was birdsong
Studdard crafts pieces that are brutally honest and poetically surprising. The collection is built, poem by poem, on truth and vulnerability. Each piece confides with readers in ways the job application never can nor will.
Studdard expertly turns the sterile application process into a fertile ground for poetic ruminations. Dear poetry readers everywhere -- this special collection by a special poet is not to be missed. Dear Selection Committee is highly recommended as the perfect candidate for your TBR list. You won’t regret the decision.
Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.