Melissa Broder Books in Order

Broder’s first poetry collection combines family tensions, religious identity, consumer culture and unsettling desires. Controlled verse forms carry darkly comic portraits of ordinary life, moving between domestic routines and strange images that expose what people conceal beneath familiar language.

These poems explore bodily existence through images of food, blood, desire and mortality. Dark humor and surreal transformations place familiar fears in unsettling landscapes, where the speaking voice moves between sorrow, menace and an uneasy search for meaning.

These poems explore hunger, mystery, and the uneasy experience of being alive. Turning existential questions outward toward the universe, Broder combines humor with spiritual uncertainty as she probes desire and the strangeness of having a body.

Broder examines mortality alongside the losses of love, identity, and cherished illusions. Moving between confession and elegy, these poems explore how apparent endings can open possibilities for renewal while confronting persistent desire and uncertainty about death.

Melissa Broder expands on the anxieties behind her anonymous Twitter account in this collection of personal essays. She examines panic attacks, addiction, relationships, sex, and mortality, exploring the search for connection and meaning through candid reflections on everyday life.

After a breakup and years struggling with her dissertation, Lucy spends the summer dog-sitting in Venice Beach. An encounter with an alluring swimmer becomes an obsessive relationship with a merman, unsettling her ideas about desire, love, and emotional escape.

Rachel organizes her life around restrictive eating and a demanding relationship with her mother. Meeting Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman working at a frozen yogurt shop, awakens appetites that challenge Rachel's carefully maintained control over food, faith, and intimacy.

Selected poems from four earlier collections explore bodily desire, spiritual longing, and the fear of annihilation. Broder brings humor and intimacy to encounters with the sacred and grotesque, accompanied by a new introduction reflecting on her work.

A woman retreats to California’s high desert while her father lies in intensive care and her husband struggles with illness. A strange encounter during a hike draws her into a journey through grief, fear, and unexpected possibility.