Book emerges from turning feelings into words

Melissa Mendelson, of Monroe, learned the art of poetry in high school, as she struggled to find a way to articulate her feelings, which, she said, were “turbulent and raw.” Some of those poems went into her poetry collection, “Fragments of Yesterdays Past.”

In the years after high school, Mendelson continued to work on voicing her experience in poetry. In 2020, as the internal threat of possibly having to lose an ovary converged with the external threat of Covid, and she found herself in the realm of frontline workers, poetry again became a way to make sense and use of feelings. Two years later, she decided to put those poems into a book, “This Will Remain With Us,” recently published.