Double Jinx
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Dark narratives about femininity . . . Reddy channels the vibe and energy of Plath and Sexton, but it’s her arresting language that’s the real draw here.” —Publishers Weekly
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 doppelgänger. 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 ourselves, 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.”
“Exquisitely crafted poems . . . an exploration of woman’s manifold selves.” —Rebecca Dunham, author of Cold Pastoral
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her debut collection, Reddy plays with a variety of forms as she weaves sharp images and dark narratives about femininity, faith, and family. Exploring the sinister side of girlhood/womanhood, Reddy imagines Nancy Drew facing off with a lookalike: "She's a foxtrot. She's a jinx and you can't speak," or perhaps "she's the real Nancy/ and you're a costume party." Addressing the more quotidian anxiety of female adolescence, one poem's subject is reminded of how "Saturdays were dancing days" when the "boys danced slow with other girls, your homely cousins/ and your classmates." There are allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Helen of Troy, whose less-pretty sister "stays home and simmers." A series of epistles alternately address a former lover and his current partner, and Reddy also investigates a familial cycle of violence: "For a year my father beat anything that moved," and "My father's father was a woodstove. He snapped and roared." In the sonnet crown "Our Wilderness Period," she delivers a bleak parable about belief, sin, and a people abandoned by God for which the speaker, another jealous sister, feels responsible. Reddy channels the vibe and energy of Plath and Sexton, but it's her arresting language that's the real draw here.
