It Wasn't Easy to Reach You

"Dan Meltz’s poems are so intimate it almost feels like prying to read them. They’re so funny and bold and moving though, that you can’t help yourself."

-David Sedaris, New York Times bestselling author

"Meltz’s ’It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You’ reached me easily with its original cast of thought about the everyday goofs and terrors of our lives and our relationships. He is approachable and surprisingly accomplished and he wields a sure grasp of what counts even when we’re not certain exactly what it is. Daniel Meltz, poet, arrives in print like Athena, fully formed. And yes, his ’words got all over my shirt and pants.’"

-Felice Picano, Lambda Foundation Pioneer Award winning author of The Lure and Like People in History

"Daniel Meltz sees with ’new eyes.’ And few poets see so clearly the colors in the visible-and the invisible-spectrum of love, the pleasures and the pangs, the clarity and mystery. And few poets convey these colors in language more fresh. Here, under the covers, is a fluid taxonomy of love in a language with no expiration date. Follow the lines of these poems, their ’fallopian squiggles,’ listen to the music of these poems, their ’intrinsic marimbas,’ and you will be dazzled by the colors refracted in the prism of their words. Actual feeling is everywhere in these poems, feeling transcribed with unmatched passion and a fleet, witty, conversational-and dazzling-eloquence."

-Stephen Ackerman, author of Late Life, winner of the 2020 Gerard Cable Book Award

"Daniel Meltz’s beautiful first book, ’It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You,’ is an absolute thrill to read. While the title seems on one level to be a joke about the book’s long-awaitedness, it also slyly gestures toward the collection’s underlying theme of human connection and the obstacles that need to be overcome to achieve it-like the ’booby-trapped frog pond’ on the way to love, or the self’s ’stubborn grandiosity peeping out of its/ shameful hiding.’ Meltz’s voice, both playful and urgent, draws us in, and the poems have a liveliness and immediacy that somehow make them feel personal not only to the speaker but to each of us. Reading them is like finding a message in a bottle that traveled far in time and space but whose book-length note turns out to be addressed directly to you in the here and now. Believe me, you’ll be glad it reached you."

-Jeffrey Harrison, Guggenheim winner and author of The Names of Things: New & Selected Poems

"I swear you’ve been waiting for this book, waiting for a poet with Daniel Meltz’s earnest exuberance, his witty and spiced intelligence, for those sly observations that make you say, YES!, for his word play and foreplay, his rhymes straight and slant, and for the honest emergencies and hard-earned serenities they record. Not just Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch and not just a bone-deep intimacy with life’s most essential mysteries, these poems cohere as if the energetic delight of the art itself floated around everything. You’ll wish he was your best friend, and the good news is, these poems will accompany you-and elevate your own thinking-as if he were. Daniel Meltz has worked wonders to reach us, and now we’re his forever." 

-Jessica Greenbaum, author of Spilled and Gone and The Two Yvonnes

"These intelligent, clever, beyond the surface poems by Daniel Meltz will make you blush, laugh and nod your head in agreement. Like a modern-day Frank O’Hara ... Meltz is a poet of urban wonderings and urbane wit."

 -Tina Schumann. Author of Praising the Paradox and Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues

Dan Meltz was born in Newfoundland, raised in New Jersey and liberated in New York. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2012, Jewish Quarterly, Mudfish, Salamander, Tusculum Review, upstreet and lots of other journals. He is a retired technical writer and teacher of Deaf young people. He has a B.A. from Columbia and lives in Manhattan and Queens. His novel, "Rabbis of the Garden State" (2025), is published by Rattling Good Yarns.