Why God Is a Woman
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Why God Is a Woman is a collection of poems written about a magical island where women rule and men are the second sex. It is also the story of a boy who, exiled from the island because he could not abide by its sexist laws, looks back with both nostalgia and bitterness and wonders: Why does God have to be a woman? Celebrated prose poet Nin Andrews creates a world both fantastic and familiar where all the myths, logic, and institutions support the dominance of women.
Nin Andrews's books include The Book of Orgasms and Sleeping with Houdini.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Andrews (Southern Comfort) offers a provocative collection of prose poems in which gender roles are swapped and women rule on a fantastical island. This is a place where the women look like Angelina Jolie, young boys play with Boberto dolls, men earn for every dollar women make, and "the hardworking woman is forever in search of the ideal whip." The lovelorn narrator, a man who has left the otherwise unnamed island, leads a multifaceted tour through his own memories and island culture. The tales all have titles that are variations of "On the Island Where I Come From," echoing Joe Brainard's "I Remember," but with a tropical twist. In this alternate universe, men go through painful hair-removal procedures, intense to the point of becoming a kind of "spiritual practice, a preparation for sex and death"; they buy only the latest fashions, tattoo their penises, and work out incessantly. When men's wings sprout in adolescence, they stanch the blood with pads, not unlike a strange kind of angelic and masculine menstruation. Women, in contrast, are aggressive catcallers, and they grope young boys, checking a male narrator recalls from experience to see if "my fruit was ripe." Andrews comically upends gender expectations with surprisingly profound results.
