Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal and The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Meleanie McCabe to our monthly Virtual Poetry Book Club for a discussion of her collection, All The Signs Were There. Melanie is joined by Book Club Host, Hannah Grieco.
We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online »
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Melanie McCabe is a writer of poems, essays, memoir, and most recently, fiction. She is a lifelong Virginian and was a high school English and creative writing teacher in Arlington for twenty-two years. Her debut novel, Road Longer Than Memory, was published by Oceanview Publishing on June 2, 2026. Her latest book of poems, All The Signs Were There, won the Longleaf Poetry Prize. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and was published in the fall of 2017. Previous books of poems include: The Night Divers (Terrapin Books), What The Neighbors Know (FutureCycle Press) and History of the Body (David Robert Books.) Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, Shenandoah, Cincinnati Review, Sweet, Forge Literary Magazine and elsewhere.
About All The Signs Were There
“To date, there has been no bomb,” writes Melanie McCabe in her gorgeously foreboding collection of poems, All the Signs Were There. Here are overgrown vacant lots, ants running in the walls, shadowy relationships, a “coastline of sharp and slice.” This is a powerful book of omens—and of the courage to live through them. —David Ebenbach, author of What’s Left to Us by Evening
“Feral is the name given to what’s wild/ by what isn’t,” writes Melanie McCabe in this shimmering sequence that maps the heart’s bewitching cartography. Traveling through the lush landscapes of childhood and adolescence where fields reveal “the sudden stonehenge of a lone/gate,” to the stormy world of adulthood where “[m]orning, still beating, is swallowed/mouse-whole down a snake,” McCabe pays tribute to time’s uncanny passage. Here, lovers clasp hands and plunge like “banished angels” from an “edge” they carved themselves, while teenaged rivals reunite late in life, carving out friendship, forgiveness, and healing. All the Signs Were There is filled with breathtaking insight and painterly vision.—Jane Satterfield, author of The Badass Brontës
On behalf of all of us at Longleaf– and previous Longleaf Press Book Prize winners–who helped read and comment on hundreds of manuscripts, I want to celebrate All the Signs Were There, the intelligence and range of Melanie McCabe’s atmospheric poems and her unique and otherworldly ear for the language. We were riveted: “/the air that finds my lungs is chosen for its jade/ stillness. Each breath for its lull.” —Roger Weingarten, Publisher, Longleaf Press
About Book Club
This is no run-of-the-mill book club. Visiting writers will read excerpts, join the discussion, and answer your questions about craft, process, the publishing industry, and getting advice for our own writing! We’ll hang and eat snacks with the authors and escape your doomscrolling.
Poetry Book Club will meet on Zoom every second Wednesday of the month with a new poet.
Fiction Book Club will meet every third Sunday of the month in person at The Writer’s Center with a new author.
Come build community and read amazing books that the Big 5 didn’t have the sense to publish!
If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.
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