Selected by Mark Doty from over one thousand manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Melissa Stein’s debut Rough Honey is a startling, sensuous collection. 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 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. But their struggles are rendered in language so radiant, it can’t help but hint at the possibility of transcendence, the sheer sweetness in being alive.