Further Praise for Pulse:

Melissa Fadul’s debut collection Pulse is a deeply moving exploration of girlhood, gender and social justice. In poems that both elegize and celebrate, Fadul bears witness to histories of violence, from the Holocaust to Stonewall to the murder of Matthew Shepard to the struggles of high school students in the speaker’s New York City classrooms. Pulse is a book of historical reckoning and personal experience—a beautiful, urgent collection.

 —Nicole Cooley

Poet Melissa Fadul writes from a deeply witnessed perspective that evokes the very soul of childhood in her debut collection Pulse. Alongside masterful poetic-storytelling. Fadul weaves her witness of private histories and truth, whilst shaping words and phrases of incomparable beauty that pour into a mesmerizing story of love, pain, memory, and ultimately the miracle of survival. Her intensely alive, lyrical, and fearless writing is electric with prescient urgency, wavering between sorrow and joy whilst retaining a hypnotic heart.

—Candice Louisa Daquin, author of Tainted by the Same Counterfeit