Melissa Morelli Lacroix explores the love and longing, loss and pain, grief and healing found in the music of Frédéric Chopin, Clara Schumann, and Claude Debussy in a series of poetic cycles that respond to each composer’s work. Lacroix writes with her ear finely tuned to the music of death and decay, to the harmonies and discords of music, nature, and human desire. Always, in A Most Beautiful Deception, we find the chords of love and devotion being torn apart by the deterioration of the body. Lacroix uses her research into the composers’ lives to add layers and nuance, thus creating a complex triangle between the reader, the music, and the poet. Woven almost imperceptibly into these accounts of three composers and their respective fights against the decay of the body and the mind, lies the thread of the poet’s own relationships and loss.

Melissa Morelli Lacroix is a writer, teacher, and editor who lives and works in Edmonton. She has degrees in creative writing from Lancaster University and the University of Alberta as well as a certificate in Translation Studies. Melissa teaches piano and writing.

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Melissa Morelli Lacroix crafts poems responding to the complex negotiations of love... A Most Beautiful Deception recounts death and suffering woven through with the irreplaceable moments of life and the sweet sting of memories. Reaching to the early nineteenth century, the poems weave lives of artists, mourners, and admirers while modelling the composers' musical scores in form.... Although emphasizing degeneration and death--physical, social, psychological--the poems maintain vibrancy, often crystallizing sound, light, colour, and emotion.... Despite its complexity and range, Deception is remarkably accessible, managing to humanize musical giants and to harmonize life's glory and brutality while avoiding sentimentalism.

Canadian Literature