It was on the heels of some weird and troubling times for women in general, during which I’d been working on some prose poem series centered on some of my favorite things—Plath, horror movies, the work of Salvador Dali, while also working on a series of pieces about relationships and how difficult it is to reconcile love as a straight woman with male privilege and violence. I started to notice threads of ideas connecting all these disparate bits and suddenly had a manuscript that made sense thematically as an encapsulation of all sorts of anxieties that I foster as a woman in the world-about love, about violence and fear, about artmaking itself.
And it's true---so much of this book and pulling it together was shaped by a few things that were coinciding in 2017 as I was finishing it-- our visit to the Death Museum in New Orleans (very much a church to the terrible things men do (usually to women), the Me Too movement, mass shootings, my own relationship and anxieties (all of these explored in the how to write a love poem in a time of war pieces). The dirty blonde section, which is older, is about uncomfortableness with female sexuality and agency. The Plath centos in honey machine are about domestic routine and the idea of "the wife." The Dali poems are told from the point of view largely of Dali's wife in the guise of the ghostly little blue dog.
What results is hopefully an amalgamation of what it feels like to be a woman (or at least a mostly straight woman) who has to love a gender that she should probably really be afraid of given statistics--maybe not even just physical violence, but different types of agression, gaslighting, and erasure that plagues women in all settings.
You can get your hands on a copy by pre-ordering here...
