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A Middle-Aged Woman Rages
Melissa Jørgenrud Helton
Melissa Jørgenrud Helton's debut collection, A Middle-Aged Woman Rages, captures a life on the brink of fifty. These poems confront parenting grown children, divorce, and a country in the midst of political upheaval, all while navigating perimenopause and fighting to sustain creativity and healing. Searing and unapologetic, Helton refuses silence. Her poems name what women are taught to swallow and model truth-telling as survival—inviting and emboldening women to speak with power and without permission.
What Others Say About A Middle-Aged Woman Rages
Melissa Jørgenrud Helton is too young to be called a crone, too social to be called a hag, too grounded to be "the Great Black Swamp woman," but this is the magic female energy one feels in reading A Middle-Aged Woman Rages. In this spellbinding collection, Helton chronicles and negotiates the world as a woman in middle age. People chide her: "Listen up girlie, … / We like you quieter, much softer." But the poet declares "I am writing this and sharing it out loud." With fierce energy and a creative use of poetic styles, these poems collaborate as an affirmation against the evils women face and as an entreaty to "thrive in flux," to pay "deliberate, unceasing attention" to everything in the world, "as if it were holy."
—Marianne Worthington, author of The Girl Singer
Through these poems, I come to understand the middle-aged woman raging as a community spiritual worker. Like the poet herself, these poems reflect us back to ourselves, they give us ideas about how to get up and get out from under whatever is holding our humanity hostage. Through book spine poems and dialogue poems reminiscent of Louise Glück, "the wise hand opens the appendices" and finds the poetry all around us, "tries to find the sounds of yellow in October." These hands mother and rescue and play bingo. These poems are fearless and yet they understand the importance of acknowledging our fears and telling what we must tell to survive.
—Joy Priest, author of Horsepower
The poems in Melissa Helton's A Middle-Aged Woman Rages create sisterhood and community. They heal and affirm. Their fearlessness, humor, and lyrical beauty give the reader heart to hear, as the poet does, "how hope echoing back to you squalls in the ear." These poems continue the deeply feminist work of poets like Adrienne Rich, who could have been describing this collection when she wrote, "Poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation." Helton's work reminds readers they are enough, that "we hold each other's hand, which is our own."
—Annie Woodford
Helton's poetic politics are not for women only. In poems like "Makin' It Great!" & "Disunion Refutation" she speaks for all who are marginalized & abused: immigrants, LBGTQ folks, single mothers, the poor, & Earth herself. Two things keep this from being overwhelming: the poet's lyrical love of the natural world & the wealth of forms she writes in: villanelle, duplex, documentary, book spine, haibun, list & more. Her passion & artistry left me awed, energized, & ready to write. What more could you want?
—George Ella Lyon, author of Back to the Light: Poems; Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015 – 2016
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But it's never really rage, is it?
It's self-defense. It's grief.
It's the crying out of the birthed
and the birthing. It's an iceberg
flipping upside down and showing
the enormous, honest jade mass
of itself, striped with black.
It's saying everything that came
before this moment was circus
house mirrors, was involuntary
intoxication. She never really rages
the way a man rages, the way late July
rages, the way a smoke alarm rages.
Instead, it is a new hickory sucker,
spouted desperately from the cut,
bending and bending and bending
and bending and bending until
the wood fibers tear and splay.
Her not-really-rage is a pot rusting
in the rain until it stains whatever it's
sitting on. It is some night creature
slinking out to drag off the dead
cardinal the escaped housecat
so unnecessarily killed
and left on the porch.
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Details and Ordering
Publication Date: May 15, 2026
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-961127-25-8
Price: $19.00
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About the Author
Melissa Jørgenrud Helton is Literary Arts Director of Hindman Settlement School, a cultural nonprofit in Knott County, Kentucky. Her work has been published in Shenandoah, Women Speak, Still: The Journal, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Norwegian Writers Climate Campaign, and more. Her chapbooks include Inertia: A Study (Finishing Line Press), and Hewn (Workhorse), and her first full length collection is A Middle-Aged Woman Rages (Accents Publishing). She is editor of the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky (University Press of KY) and Untelling, the literary and arts magazine of Hindman Settlement School. Her work has been supported through the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and has been awarded the George Scarbrough Poetry Prize, the Emma Bell Miles Nonfiction Prize, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and once won her a piece of key lime pie. She has been honored with the Mildred Haun Award of Excellence and designation as a Kentucky Colonel, and she is a dual citizen in the United Kingdom.
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