When I go to the shaman I can’t breathe. She says I am full of foreign beings from my belly to my throat. She says she can feel my energy. She keeps burping.

My head is going to pop off. I am scared she will judge me. Her room is meant to make a person comfortable, 1000 crystals and a cat, but i am not responding to the good vibes or I am positioning myself against them as if they are reflective of a cosmic arbiter who knows I am a piece of shit.

The shaman and I find a bat, two rats and a shield-shaped being inside the walls of my sternum. She invokes the angel Michael to give them a boat to heaven.

The bat and the rats leave easily. They didn’t know they were inside me.

The shield-shaped being was passed down from my father’s family.  He believes he is here to protect me.  The shield-shaped being is trying to protect my soul orb, which is behind my ribcage and looks like snow.  But no light can get in.

The shaman talks to the shield-shaped being in shield-language, which is English, to let him know I am not his home. He cries as he leaves my body.

Now I am vacant of beings.

The shaman says my core will not stay empty. She says that I will repopulate it with me.

When I leave the shaman I feel like I can breathe again. When I return to the people who love me I suffocate.


Two new poems in beautiful Sixth Finch (poem 1 and poem 2).

Two new poems at The Good Men Project.

Poetry Crush asked me to write abt a dead poet I want to fuck, but I am tired of dead ppl so I wrote abt poetboys and pubes and porn.


i have a question,and i hope for answer. When im meditating, i am seein vision of twitter. what does this mean????

i did meditation and,, in my meditation i somehow got to a dark place where it only where 2 colors black and pink and i saw a face that was so much prettier than my face I was PISSED

Hey! Guess what! This is Meditation! You are relaxing, To yourself it gives you time to clear your head and you are at peace with everything for that time until you go back in the world and are alive and no more peace anymore sorry

Question: How do you deal with your heartbeat?

if you are listening to the thong song, your not gonna get completely relaxed into a meditative state.

Thinking is your mind speaking to your own self in words. When the mind is focused enough from meditation, it says ‘shut the fuck up asshole’ in a gentle way

Check out my NEWLY DISCOVERED and radical form of hating yourself meditation

Now that the idiot brought up breathing I can’t stop thinking about me breathing

something that helps relax ur mind and soul thus giving you inner peace or serenity PLEASE COME FIND MEE!!!!

So tell me, if religion is the ego on crack and I don’t have A religion, how do you explain my absurd display of egotism?

I count down from 20 about 3 times slowly until I start thinking about myself less but still all the time


New poem is poem of the day at The Academy of American poets.

Also, new poems in Better, which is a rad new online journal w video and audio.

Kacee Belcher, who is just such a great egg, interviewed me. I talked about being sober, which I really never talk about except one other time.


Vivisecting you is sweet and architectural until I get to the belly.

Strangers crawl out and strangers are too intimate.

Sometimes they carry around old photographs of pets.

Sometimes I catch them shoveling rice in their mouths and then they are me.

I lay out your bones in a rectangular shape on a pink mat.

I handcuff your thick veiny hands to my chair.

Maggots crawl on top your face and they are all named Melissa.

I wanted two of your face.

I carry your bones in a bag to the cemetery.

The cemetery is in Amherst or Woodstock or another fake memory.

I do not bury the bones but sit with them tucked in my lap.

Yes I do love Autumn.


I wrote about Baudelaire, fucking and murdering at Pen America.

Also, I am riding horses again. I ride every Saturday at dusk in Brooklyn. As a young girl I just wanted to write poetry and ride horses. I am becoming myself.



FOUR NEW POEMS AT BOMB + ART BY PAUL K TUNIS (aka da man)

ALSO, AN INTERVIEW AT BOMB ABOUT WHEN DRUGS STOP WORKING, GOD, PUDDING, THE USUAL…


Tell the story of how I decimate the worms in my brain and tell it using pedestrian language.

Ok I am either the luckiest girl in the world or totally fucked.

Starting July 14th this is the year of learning to love the questions.

That is how the worms are slaughtered.

Was Rilke a gay man?

When the gays give me advice about extermination they don’t just let me flail like I am the roach.

The gays have always led me to Jerusalem.

Watch me watch a skinny boy in a Misfits t-shirt eat cheese fries for the rest of my life.

Watch me graffiti a fake rock.


“I’m super laid-back down to earth very open-minded. Passionate about my life and thrive off of new exciting situations and meeting other like minded individuals. What about you?”

“I’m uptight in outer space and only open-minded b/c I don’t really pay attention to anyone but myself. Lukewarm about my life and thrive off meeting individuals who will never be obsessed with me enough.”


Last night I dreamt I met my grandfather for the first time and we shared the same fetish.

I would go to unfetishing camp.

I want to connect with real humans and not feel like a missing walltile.

I keep walking up to humans and saying Expose me, lovely.

To the humans I look like just another naked woman with a bouffant.

They visualize me doing splits on a pink bed.

In the visualization I get off quick and easy.

That’s where they lose me.


Her neck appears in dioxide probationer.

Her nerves appear in double purple.

Her neverland appears in dogma practicality.

Her nightmare appears in daydream process.

Her nipples appear in disappointment proscenium.

Her nirvana appears in dosed pizza.

Her nocturne appears in domestic plagiarism.

Her noise appears in dead portal.

Her note appears in dossier puritan.

Her nothing appears in din prison.

Her nucleus appears in diarist pretension.

Her nude appears in dicky preview.

Her numskull appears in ding-dong privacy.

Her nurture appears in diehard priestess.

Her nylons appear in decadent puke.

Her oasis appears in dimension prism.


Dennis Cooper put MEAT HEART on his mid-2012 top 10 lists omg

Giancarlo DiTrapano digs my twitter feed (and MEAT HEART I think) at Vice.


Tomorrow I will be less internet-y.

I’m going to interact with a fleshy hole named TANGIBLE WORLD.

My illness sits on the edge of my bed while I sleep.

In the morning it says I’ve figured some things out. Let me share them with you.

I meditate with a rope around my head.

I ask god to pull the rope lower, lower, lower…

When I hear the word spirituality, I still think painlessness.

When I sit on a patch of grass there become three of me.

This feels like disintegrating.

I should try to speak to all three.

I shut them all up with gum.

Once there were fire ceremonies.


Prob d0 not give myself enough credit when I say NO ONE WOULD WANT TO SEE MY TITS WITH TEXT JUXTAPOSED ON TOP.

I am praying for a train delay.

The boykittens crawl up my walls and ask how to get jobs.

The walls are made of contemporary condominium fibers.

They are not even in me.

They are not even on me.

Motherfucker.

Who would you rather be?

I forget the nubile tits of others until an elderly boykitten points them out.

I’m a sheep not a discoverer.

This isn’t a persona text.

I guess it is a text that refers to itself.


Treehead stuff at the Poetry Society of America.

Humility at The Nervous Breakdown.

Courtney Maum channeled Gwyneth Paltrow & reviewed MEAT HEART.


 Never                                 think           too         hard                             about                         your                   intentions            before
bed                             or            you               will           have                  to             lick        them
and                    say                thanks                   for          all         my          bravery         and           weakness.


Milk Fed

MILK FED

"Milk Fed is a romp…a pageant of bodily juices and exploratory fingers and moan after moan of delight."
–Los Angeles Times

"A dizzily compelling story of love, lust, addiction, faith, maternal longing, and…frozen yogurt."
–Vogue

"A revelation…Melissa Broder has produced one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year..."
–Entertainment Weekly

"A thrilling examination of hunger, desire, faith, family and love."
–Time

"Milk Fed bravely questions the particularly female lionization of thin and loathing of fat, landing on fresh explanations…deliciously droll…a celebration of bodily liberation."
–The New York Times

"Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed is a delectable exploration of physical and emotional hunger."
–The Washington Post

"A sensuous and delightfully delirious tale… Filled with an unadulterated filthiness that would make Philip Roth blush, Broder’s latest is a devour-it-in-one-sitting wonder."
–O, the Oprah Magazine

Superdoom

SUPERDOOM

The Pisces

THE PISCES

"A modern-day mythology for women on the verge — if everything on the surface stops making sense, all you need to do is dive deeper.."
–The New York Times

"The Pisces convincingly romances the void."
–The New Yorker

"Explosive, erotic, scathingly funny…a profound take on connection and longing that digs deep."
–Entertainment Weekly

"The dirtiest, most bizarre, most original works of fiction I’ve read in recent memory…Broder has a talent for distilling graphic sexual thoughts, humor, female neuroses and the rawest kind of emotion into a sort of delightfully nihilistic, anxiety-driven amuse bouche…"
–Vogue.com

"A page turner of a novel…funny and frank."
–Washington Post

"The Pisces is an intellectual, enthralling voyage into one woman’s swirling mind as she brushes with the extraordinary."
–Refinery29

"Get ready to laugh-cry over and over again...a perverse romance that captures the addictive and destructive forces of obsessive love. The Pisces is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking."
–Vulture.com

Last Sext

LAST SEXT

So Sad Today

SO SAD TODAY

"What separates Broder from her confessional cohort...is that she doesn’t seem to be out to shock, but to survive."
–Elle

"Broder presents a dizzying array of intimate dispatches and confessions…She has a near-supernatural ability to not only lay bare her darkest secrets, but to festoon those secrets with jokes, subterfuge, deep shame, bravado, and poetic turns of phrase."
–New York Magazine

"A triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose."
–Vanity Fair

"Her writing is deeply personal, sophisticated in its wit, and at the same time, devastating. SO SAD TODAY is a portrait of modern day existence told with provocative, irreverent honesty."
–Nylon

"At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays…is as raw as it is funny."
–Cosmopolitan

"Broder writes about the hot-pink toxins inhaled every day by girls and women...and the seemingly impossible struggle to exhale something pure, maybe even eternal...there's a bleak beauty in the way she articulates her lowest moments."
–Bookforum

"Broder may be talking about things like sexts, Botox, and crushes, but these things are considered alongside contemplations about mortality, identity, and the difficulty of finding substance in a world where sometimes it’s so much easier to exist behind a screen."
–The Fader

"…So Sad Today is uplifting and dispiriting in seemingly equal measure. It’s a book that’s incredibly human in the way it allows for deep self-reflection alongside Broder, which speaks not only to her powerful writing but also the internet’s magical ability to foster connections."
–A.V. Club

"...delightful...Broder embarks on an earnest, sophisticated inquiry into the roots and expressions of her own sadness...deeply confessional writing brings disarming humor and self-scrutiny...Broder's central insight is clear: it is ok to be sad, and our problems can't be reduced to a single diagnosis. "
–Publishers Weekly

"Broder is probably the Internet’s most powerful merchant of feelings…"
–GQ

"Vividly rendered and outspokenly delivered essays…Sordid, compulsively readable entries that lay bare a troubled soul painstakingly on the mend."
–Kirkus Reviews

Scarecrone

S C A R E C R O N E

"Broder manages to conjure a psychic realm best described as one part twisted funhouse and two parts Catholic school, heavy on libido and with a dash of magick. This gritty, cherry soda–black book...is bizarrely sexy in its monstrousness."
–Publishers Weekly

"I don’t know what a book is if not a latch to elsewhere, and Scarecrone has pressed its skull against the hidden door. It is neither drunk nor ecstatic to be here—it is a state unto itself."
–VICE

"Lushly dark and infused with references to black magic, Broder's work often feels less like a book and more like a mystical text."
–PAPERMAG

Meat Heart

MEAT HEART

"Out to 'crucify boredom,' her poems show us how any relationship with the divine is no less at risk of engendering grotesque lust...What makes Broder such a pleasure on the page is her insistence that these dramas play out on a workaday stage infused with surreal Pop and imaginative muscle..."
–Publishers Weekly

"With a title recalling Yeats...Broder risks the divine in her second book...shrewd, funny, twisted, sad poems..."
–The Chicago Tribune

"Meat Heart...is unbelievable and overwhelming for its imaginative power alone, but if you listen past the weird you can hear all sorts of things: sadness, seriousness, life, death, and a whole lot of laughter....Broder is a tremendous talent"
–Flavorwire

"...Meat Heart embodies that strain of sustenance, that sort of psychosomatic excitement most valiant art more or less tries to pull off…Her poems don’t bore or bear down. They beam oracle energy. They pump a music of visions for the life-lusty death dance."
–BOMB

Melissa Broder's Book Cover

MOTHER

“This debut from Broder is as funny and hip as it is disturbing… a bright and unusual debut.”
–Publishers Weekly

"…obsessive, energetic and pop-culture-infused poetry…"
–Time Out New York

"Broder’s insight and honesty will make your brain light up and your hair stand on end.”
–The San Francisco Examiner

"Broder’s verse is acrobatic and whip-smart… its own creature."
–Bomb