Double Jinx: poems

Description

Ex Machina -- Divine and Mechanical Bodies -- The Case of the Double Jinx -- Understudy -- Possible and Impossible Sentences -- Little, Red -- Girl-Terrarium -- Lucy in Chrysalis -- Big Valley's Last Surviving Beauty Queen -- Cinderella Story -- Before the Catalog of Boats -- Why the McKean County Lifeguards Left Town -- Paper Anniversary -- A Theory of Disaster -- My Girlhood Apothecary -- Genealogy -- Family Portrait with Rosary and Steak Knife -- Genealogy -- Portrait of my Father as a Young Man with a Bludgeon -- In Language School My Father Learns to Pass for Dutch -- My Father Flying Home From War, 1975 -- Genealogy -- Games -- Lent -- Our Wilderness Period -- Before and After, Botched -- Still Life with Mannequin and Leg of Lamb -- Fire Plan -- Frontier Thesis -- Rabbit Starvation -- Inventing the Body -- Bad Magic -- We Won't Make it to the Talkies -- Vigil -- Friendly Letter -- Horses Dream of Horses -- All Good Girls Deserve -- Fervent Missive -- Revisionist Love Story -- Birds Keep Nothing in Their Bones -- Unsent Defense -- Cutting Nature at the Joint -- Come Fetch -- The Secret Nancy.;"Double Jinx" follows the multiple transformations both figurative and literal that accompany adolescence and adulthood, particularly for young women. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Ovid s "Metamorphoses," the rewritten fairy tales in Anne Sexton s "Transformations," and the wild and shifting dreamscapes of Brigit Pegeen Kelly s work, these poems track speakers attempting to construct identity. A series of poems depict the character of Nancy Drew as she delves into an obsession with a doppelganger. Cinderella wakes up to a pumpkin and a tattered dress after her prince grows tired of her. A young girl obsessed with fairy tales becomes fascinated with a copy of "Grey s Anatomy" in which she finds a pink girl pinned to the page as if in vivisection. Could she / be pink inside like that? No decent girl / would go around the world like that, uncooked. The collection culminates in an understanding of the ways we construct our selves, whether it be by way of imitation, performance, and/or transformation. And it looks forward as well, for in coming to understand our identities as essentially malleable, we are liberated. Or as the author writes, we ll be our own gods now. --publisher marketing.