I Have Never Read A Book that Defied My First Impressions So Quickly: On Joe Nelms's The Last Time I Died

All readers have biases. We can’t help it. Some of us are genre snobs, reading only literary fiction, science fiction or New Romance. Some of us are book-jacket snobs, unable to pick up a volume that looks cheaply made. Some of us are title snobs, letting a well-turned phrase turn our heads so that we snap up a book without even reading the back cover and rejecting unappealing titles out of hand.

It may be a backhanded compliment to say Joe Nelms’ debut novel, The Last Time I Died, might be prey to book-snobs’ prejudices, but that those prejudices would be, in this case, completely unfounded. The title is, to my mind, unfortunately basic, and the cover image and font make it seem like a grocery-store rack kind of read, possibly a knockoff of some popular thriller that is currently on the best-seller list.

However, I have never read a book that defied my first impressions so quickly. From the very first page, I could tell that Nelms was a good writer. By the tenth page, I knew he was an excellent one. His sentences are crisp, clear and surging, creating a current that makes you unable to put the book down:

My head is pounding and there’s only so much coffee I can drink before the balance tips from beneficial by way of caffeine buzz and energy boost to an annoying incessant need to urinate causing me to excuse myself three or four times from the same meeting. Unprofessional.

I wish I had some coke. I don’t. I have to gut it out.

Alternating between longer rants and short, bite-sized observations, Nelms’ hero – antihero may be a better term for him – begins the novel as a miserable divorcee intent on self-destruction. He’s not the typical successful sleaze ball lawyer, though he seems like it at first. He grew up in foster-care and cannot remember anything that happened to him before he was nine, when he witnessed his father murdering his mother. He never had a problem with this lack of memory, until a fight, which he initiated, leaves him momentarily dead. In the space between living and dying, he catches hold of an early memory.

This memory leads him on what is not simply a masochistic journey, but rather an intensely dangerous and risky path towards the discovery of what he actually experienced before age nine. The reveal of further details is too delicious to spoil them here, but it is perfectly paced and incredibly readable.

Even more surprising, the book is often funny. The alternating voices of the wry first-person narrator and the observing and sarcastic third-person narrator balance one another out and describe situations both familiar and foreign with equal ease and self-deprecating humor:

Our man has arrived back at his apartment upright and sober.

Having administered his own slightly premature dismissal from the hospital, he has bypassed countless liquor vendors along the way home, no doubt disappointing the local population of mixologists hoping for a despondent derelict to while away an afternoon at the mercy of their skilled hands.

Though the plot gets dark quicker than nighttime falls in February, there is playfulness in almost every paragraph. An extremely satisfying read, it’s made sure that I pay attention to Joe Nelms’ future offerings.

Funny and Heart-wrenching All At Once: Sarah Bruni's The Night Gwen Stacy Died

There is so much material to be plumbed from the Spider-Man canon, so much mythologizing and fantasizing and romanticizing to be had, and it’s not so much that Sarah Bruni wields an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Spider-Man in her debut novel, The Night Gwen Stacy Died, but she is skilled in exploiting this material, understanding the weight it carries in the minds of both her readers and characters. Wrapped in a sleek, hardboiled-ish sheen, the narrative skulks behind high schooler Sheila Gower, gas station attendant in insipid Iowa with dreams of the bright lights of Paris. When in walks Peter Parker—or a boy calling himself Peter Parker—brandishing a gun he’s never used and a backstory he doesn’t understand. Sheila is swept away in a stolen cab, the willing victim of a staged abduction, and the pair sets its sights on Chicago—it’s not Paris, but it’s not Iowa. Sheila buys into Peter’s story, adopting the name of the tragic Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man’s first love (well “first” for all intents and purposes, although that’s up for debate within the Marvel Universe), allowing the Spider-Man myth to assume its role in her life:

“There are moments when such slippage occurs, between the regular, everyday world and the interior worlds created, and these are the moments that fortify and support the worst delusions.”

Much to her credit, Bruni uses the Spider-Man lore not to ignite her story, but to fuel it: these are real issues for her runaway characters, speaking to larger themes of first love, of responsibility, of identity. Sound familiar? At no point does the conceit feel authorial; Bruni’s prose is the webbing to support this. With literary agility that is playful in its storytelling and plot-handling, Bruni weaves in and out of the heads of her characters, the sorcerer of a teenaged world that is as authentic as any in literary fiction. In this respect, Bruni’s treatment is reminiscent of the work of Brian Michael Bendis, longtime Marvel Comics writer and pioneer in the new age of Spider-Man storytelling, expert at rendering the complicated lives of teenagers, super-powered or not. Bruni, like Bendis, is funny and heart-wrenching all at once.

But The Night Gwen Stacy Died is not lacking in its superpowers either, or at least the supernatural. The Chicago of the novel is mysteriously overrun by a Greek chorus of displaced coyotes. Peter Parker is a boy overwhelmed by prophesizing dreams that can only be described as Spider-Sensical. Bruni litters the narrative with ghastly images both real and imagined. Hitchcock’s Vertigo readily comes to mind, and to a lesser extent the detective novels of the 1920s and ’30s, as Bruni employs a narrative pacing that makes for a genuine page-turner. Bruni’s world is dark in the ways the world can be for a seventeen-year-old and her ennui-addled heart, a world so close to our own and yet so distant. To great effect does Bruni invoke the Spider-Man lore for her reinvented Gwen and Peter and with a deft hand infuses her runaway tale with the weight of fifty years of comic book storytelling. Not as a crutch, but as a complement not often seen in literary fiction. This is what separates Bruni’s debut novel from mere fan boy fantasy. It’s a fine line Bruni walks, and she walks it well, as she knows she must. After all, with great power there must also come . . . well, you know.

The Whole World Is Cry: A Review of Sara Lippmann's Doll Palace

The twenty-three stories in Sara Lippmann’s debut collection, Doll Palace, published by Dock Street Press are a lesson in voice. And depth. And characterization. And sentence-making. The writing is so superb I want to recommend this book to teachers of short fiction. But really, it’s about damned good storytelling. It’s a book for readers, first and foremost.

The collection opens with one of my favorite Lippmann stories: “Whipping Post,”originally published in Our Stories. The story is a brief and powerful look back at an incident at a state fair when the narrator states, “I was so young I jingled.” Lippmann’s narrators are smart, observant, sometimes world-weary and never self-pitying. The voice throughout is strong, direct, honest, while at the same time loose, conversational.

One imagines sitting across from the one friend we all have who has been through some shit and has a thing or two to say about it. As in lines like this, from another favorite from the book,“The Best of Us”: “The day we found out there was nothing wrong with me, I cheated on Neill.” Okay, tell me more. Please.

I love the way Sara Lippmann’s characters talk to each other. How she moves them around. I love being privy to all the couple-trouble, teen angst, existential terror, the women and mothers’conversations, the veiled and unveiled threats, and subtle flirtations. These people and their secrets. They’re all so real I feel I know them, even the teen girl who performs as her knife throwing father’s human target. Who writes a story about a girl like that? Well, Sara Lippmann does.

Very often bravado masks a certain vulnerability. A brokenness that’s not asking for your sympathy, only that you pay attention. When the mask finally comes off it’s breathtaking and Lippmann delivers these moments with impeccable timing, as in this moment from the story “The Best of Us”:

“I wasn’t always like this, I want to shout. I once was interesting and alive and somewhat likable and not the least needy, not this pathetic shell, although I’m not sure how true that is. Maybe I’ve always been this way, only everything is forgivable when you’re young, like poor fashion taste. She wraps me up in her flesh and I stay there long enough to feel my heart thrum: change your life, change your life, change your life.”

In the story, “Houseboy,” Lippmann writes the voice of a young former officer in the Israeli Arm who now works as houseboy for a wealthy family in the U.S. It’s a risky choice that pays off. I recommend reading this particular story aloud just to marvel at the music she achieves here:

“I vision Bette. There is something shell shockage about her. . . . Bette have shoulders ripe as Jericho oranges from once upon a time. I do not go there. Where do I go? The whole world is cry. Water flood her cup, spill her wrist, soften the elbow, I drain in tears, but when she close the tap to breathe I pray maybe she have place inside her deep rise and fall of lungs for me.”

There are the sentences themselves, swoon-worthy and sharp:

“Leather sandals hung from cords like cured meat.” (from “Jew”)

“It’s his enlarged prostate, mom says. She slides on her oven mitt, speaks to the roast she’s been basting. Looks like Blade Master’s sprung a leak.” (from “Target Girl”)

“Snow fell from the sky like tiny stars. He was a man.” (from “The Last Resort”)

“There’s something to be said for people who know exactly what they’re doing.” (from “Everyone Has Your Best Interests At Heart”)

“Later, Frank will become my summer lens.” (from “Human Interest”)

“Free-loving goddesses traipse through the grass in a yogic haze, breasts cupped in cabbage leaves, their hair trailing like kite strings and dip into wide, glittery pools. We are in the desert. This is called a mirage.” (from “The Best of Us”)

These are stories filled with talk, conversations, recitations, memories, flirtations (often dangerous ones) and hard-won epiphanies I think what I love best about these stories though is their refusal to dot every i. There are no simple answers and lessons aren’t always learned. A deft writer, Lippmann displays control over her narratives even as she achieves a certain wildness and strangeness that both fascinates and feels entirely true. I love the fearlessness of these stories (see “Target Girl” and “Everyone Has Your Best Interests at Heart” and “Babydollz” and “Talisman”among others).

An inescapable sense of danger and vulnerability permeates many of the stories of the collection. There is so  much growing up to be done. Lippmann avoids sentimentality. Rather, she tells her stories with such grace, sensitivity, and compassion as to evoke the same response in her readers. These stories, and the characters who inhabit them are unforgettable. My biggest challenge in writing this recommendation was reining myself in. I could go on and on. But as the young woman from the story “Come See For Yourself” observes: “Some things fill you up and you don’t need to say another word about it.”

Less Is More: Klaus Merz's Out of the Dust

There is a freshness of approach, an originality of metaphor in Out of the Dust by Klaus Merz (beautifully translated by Marc Vincenz) that is astounding. Alongside that magnetic originality — of image, phrase and characterization — is a kindness and romantic (with a small “r”) impulse that makes his poetry irresistibly appealing.

The opening poem “Hard into the Wind” turns the tables on being a nonconformist — “Never played golf…or sailed hard into the wind” — speak to the poet’s self-loyal lifestyle and values, a “never” contrasted with what he HAS frequently done, “see(ing) within my nearest /, all the way into her /childhood faces.” Thus the poem conveys a soft but firm sense that not sailing “Hard into the wind” is hard too.  Reversal of direction, and the startling oxymoron, are two of Merz’s spirited array of techniques.

Moments like “Clouds roll/adamantly by” (“Pinacoteca”), “Since yesterday he owns a mobile and/the world considers him healed,” (“Back Office”), and “Entered an area/somewhere south of trepidation”) all convey the truth that when a poet enhances reality with metaphors, truths much harder to find than appearances are revealed. Nowhere is Merz’s artful blending of characterization and oxymoron more evident than in the brief poem “Beyond Recall”:

“Towards midnight
a yodeling moped driver zips
past my window
with his visor open as if
he were going off to a happy war.”

Merz conveys the ludicrous concept of a “happy war” through the peculiar, almost unreal moped driver; he manages to make his (admittedly vague) antiwar statement a humorous one. The conclusion — “Why then, a little later / does the noise / of my burning cigarette paper / terrify me?” — suggests an intuition against war on the part of the apparently very high strung narrator, one that emphasizes the absurdity of a “happy war.”

Merz’s world is a shimmering window onto beauty and insight, so precisely understated that many of the poems border on the hypnotic and can be read time and time again. It’s no wonder that so many are short, eight or ten lines or less: his eye and ear are both so incisive that if he wrote at too great length the resultant intensity could be painful. Merz is a poet who expands and deepens with his conciseness, who embodies imagism’s implied aesthetic of “less is more.” This book of exceptional magic will expand the horizons of anyone who reads it.

Fragmentation and Loneliness, the New Dance Craze: A Love Note to Music for Another Life

Music for another life is a collaborative text, a print book with color images (shot by Max Avi Kaplan) and black serif-font text (composed by Kristina Marie Darling) on facing pages. Image and text dance and sway in the reader’s imagination. But taken separately, what work does the set of images perform? And what work the text?

Kaplan opens with the iconic cover image: a female figure in a red dress. She is blonde, gloved, resting on the grass, her eyes closed. We see her, but she does not see us. In the next image, she stands, red skirt, gloved, handing a letter in the direction of something or someone we cannot see. Then she looks into the afternoon sun, her gaze opposing the gaze of the greek goddess in relief behind her. She pauses, red fingertips to red lips, looking down, still not making eye contact. And then she descends the entry stairs of a building, stepping away from the goddess in relief. She looks out, for a ride, maybe, handbag clutched tight. A solar flare lights her face, still looking into the distance past the viewing subject. A misplaced halo. For the first time, her context is natural, trees and sky rather than built environment. She stands in her red suit next to the building, poised as though an argument were arriving, or a mother in law, or a firing squad. And then, the image again of the cover and frontispiece: red suit, gloves, blonde hair, lawn. She stands before the butterfly bush in her sleeveless floral dress, no gloves, Raybans pulled forward for a better look. This is the first time she gazes directly at us. She places the sunglasses onto her face. She is at the beach, just a palm tree and sky behind her, her arms akimbo. Like a doll. She is playing with her sunglasses again. On a hammock at the beach, sunglasses removed, we see that her blonde hair is a wig and her floral dress a fifties swimsuit. On a blue chaise cushion, from just above her, just the top of her blonde wig, her white arms splayed from elbow to fingertip, ungloved hands open. We don’t know if she can see us. She relaxes on the chaise, water in the distance, her gaze away from us toward something inland. We reposition to be next to her. She looks at us again. A pout, a plea. She is in the garden among the hydrangeas. She stands in a stone courtyard, ungloved, clutching her handbag. Her sundress pinched at the waist, heels like pegs beneath her feet. She stands, arms stiff, like a doll. A shot from the ground in front of her. She looks at us. Has she been crying? Is she trying not to cry? We think one or both might be true. She turns to walk away. She looks away, pillbox hat at the back of her wigged head, classical architecture behind her. The hat is a turban wrapped like a swami’s. She pouts before a Georgian porch. We stand beneath her as she looks over the railing, her ungloved fingertips painted red as talons. A halo of clouds. We step back. She stands at the railing, testing the sharpness of the black iron finial with a red fingertip. We are now meters away from her. She has climbed the railing and is standing on the lower rung, looking out past us. She has reached the gate. She caresses the finials, thinking. And then she is at the edge of the lawn, near the trees, arm outstretched to whatever might save her.

Neck deep in the swimming pool, she floats. She comes to the edge of the pool and hangs on to the side, her forearms relaxed on the blue tile. Her hands on the blue tile. A wedding ring on one hand, a bracelet on the other wrist. Relaxed.

But of course this story the images tell is nothing like the story the text provides. The images provide us a narrative from the outside, the story as a stranger would see it, the story of a woman who has manufactured an image and presence for public display, a story we have been enculturated to accept and read and participate in as we construct our own physical and visual identities.

Kristina Marie Darling’s text “makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone,” as Robbe-Grillet writes that the new novel (and novelist) must do. Each page offers a collection of narrative detail that seems both discordant and unrelated to the facing image. The elements of each page’s collection do not necessarily cohere. Only in the long read, as the reading subject collects and aggregates the layers of detail from page to page to page, does the coherence occur. I found myself reading and re-reading the text to loop the narrative strands together: the narrative voice, the marriage, the social expectation and the protagonist’s response, the comments on fashion and expectation, the emptiness, the loneliness. The loneliness. Darling’s narrative tessera begin as fully formed sentences and then fracture and fragment as the story draws on until, at the end, on the final page, we have shards of text, five abstract unrelated sentences followed by two images in fragments. From the “bluest eyes” and wedding-cake of the first page of text to the “unsuitable blue sky” and “dust … settl[ing] on the hem of my dress” on the last, the movement from hope to resignation is both magical mystery tour and confession. Adelle plays her part in the images; Adelle comes apart in the text. And together, that brittle, fragile dance of what seems and what is are the deep gift of this beautiful, haunting book.

I love this book. It requires work; or it doesn’t. You can look at it as a curiosity, a set of intriguing musings and gorgeous, quirky photographs. Or you can sift through the layers and fragments and, as you suture together what Darling and Kaplan have created, find yourself somewhere in the thread (or even the needle).

This Alienated Hero: A Review of Gabriel Chad Boyer's Welcome to Weltschmerz

I wanted to walk away from this book as if a newly single man from a conflict-wrought relationship. I wanted to forego any sense of duty to the protagonist and his attendant world. But I had to see things through.

Friends, to read Gabriel Chad Boyer’s book, Welcome to Weltschmerz, is to enter into a conversation with an interlocutor that will break all the rules of polite authorship, but you find you cannot leave for niceties sake, for interest, then for sheer incredulity and inspiration at the arc of the story before you. It is like talking to a homeless man, at whom you are nodding out of politeness until you realize that he knows every line of John Berryman’s Dream Songs and can recite them backwards.

Boyer’s memoir follows a younger version of himself around the perimeter of the U.S. on a failing quest to perform bedroom theater in the homes of strangers and friends in a few keystone cities. The result is a journey fraught with engine failure, interpersonal conflict, and many empty, cold nights in a VW minibus without his side-kick Jill.

Jill and Boyer met up in Boston and followed a love-inspired proposal to perform dada-ist, grotesque, un- or loosely-scripted shows together for impromptu house crowds from Boston to San Francisco. The so-called bedroom theater is the love child of our two main characters: her art world idiosyncrasies and his lit-perfected neuroticism make for a decrepit ecstasy, but this memoir is more about Boyer’s relationship with himself than any relationship he has to theater, or to the girl who turns away from him as the story progresses.

Before his journey starts, we learn that Boyer has recently emerged from a depression that is as unexplained, in the book, as it is portentous. By the end of the journey, the fallout from his up and down is palpable, but something is different, perhaps. In revision of his long-winded manuscript, Boyer creates a conversion perspective that arises, latent and unsure.

The reader is wise to distrust it. The character Boyer has made a point of erasing all trust in him through repeated self-immolation, which is at first comical then infuriating, unregistered and finally cathartic. I suppose it is fitting that the last couple of chapters focus on the final, impromptu destination of burning man, where Boyer’s minor conflagration is surrounded by a larger, cultural burn. .

The tone is different in these last several pages and the hundred or so preceding them. We hear a mature Boyer coming through in the asides and self-conscious rants that mark most pages. This revisionist metanoia and the character it creates are well worth the wait, and may even redeem the time spent wandering the desert in search of empathy or human connection, when both were lacking.

Style-wise, Boyer’s self-conscious hyperbolic insecurity and his love of discursive prose places him in the camp of David Foster Wallace and anyone else who pushes the boundary of page-long footnotes. Boyer’s footnotes are thankfully more limited and of relative import.

And his self-consciousness starts out crisp, as he spins us profoundly terrifying visions based on the neurosis of his former self, a neurosis tied up with his life as a writer. When he professes, early on, “a tendency to exaggerate and generally speaking distort the most straightforward of stories,” we see into this maladaptive mind, recognizing his character flaw, but appreciating what is evidently the reason for this book.

This alienated hero memoir pushes a tradition forward of irresolute pilgrimage that is well-placed in 21st century writing. In its execution, it leaves the reader wounded and distrustful but all the more affected when the story promises to yield, and does, a fuller vision.

An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling

Leah Umansky: Reading Vow, is like peering into someone’s secret past. A woman is said to be married. Her fiancé dies. She is left, bereft and almost-helpless. It reminds me much of Jane Eyre (for what would Jane be without her Rochester?). On the other hand, it reminds me of Charlotte Bronte herself and the way the Bronte Parsonage was both her home and her fortress. She died soon after she was married, too. With this said, how does your poetry lend itself to allusions? Do you find these books and stories are intrinsic to your life as a writer, or do you seek out these connections?

Kristina Marie Darling: That’s a great question. Most of my poems arise out of my life as a reader. I’ve always been intrigued by Marianne Moore’s use of the term “conversity,” a word she coined to describe the dialogic nature of poetry. With that in mind, I envision my poems as a response to the work that came before my own. By that I don’t just mean poetry, but also fiction, visual art, and literary theory. I’ve always thought it was the writer’s job to not only revise and modify earlier texts, but to forge connections between different texts. With Vow, I definitely sought to explore the relevance of these nineteenth century women’s texts to contemporary debates about language, gender and received literary forms.

For me, Vow represents a corrective gesture. In much of nineteenth century literary culture, women’s writing occupied a marginal space. For example, the sketchbook – which consisted of songs, notes, poems, diary entries, and a mixture of many other types of writing — was considered a predominantly female literary form. More often than not, literary forms that were marked as female were relegated to a private space. When writing Vow, I was interested in taking this marginal space, which women’s writing so often occupied, and making it a focal point.

LU: I’m interested in the speaker of these poems. I know you just founded your own feminist press, Noctuary Press, so I know you have a clear relationship to gender in writing. What is her connection to the self? She’s strong, yet impressionable. She wants answers. She wants direction. She wants. What governs her? Is it desire? Is it loneliness? Is it the story inside being the bride? Women are expected to be so many different roles, besides being a woman.

For example: She “doesn’t know how” to use her wings.

                        She “doesn’t know how” to wear the dress.

                        She tries “ascending,” but says “it’s hard to know.”

                        She says,“a locked room, but what else?”

KMD: I’m very interested in the notion of the palimpsest, a text that is written, erased, and written over again and again. This is exactly how I envisioned the speaker of the poems in Vow.  She is inscribed and reinscribed with many different roles, expectations, and normative ideas about gender. These range from the complex culture surrounding weddings — the white dress, the ceremony, and the other accompanying rituals — to the myriad beliefs about what a wife should be, and what constitutes failure as a wife. The speaker of these poems definitely feels that she has failed as a wife, and as a result, she has been buried alive by the many normative ideas about marriage that have been inscribed onto her. She is motivated by the desire to erase this palimpsest, and find out what’s underneath the words and beliefs others have imposed upon her marriage and her identity. With that said, she is also interested in carefully documenting everything, for herself and for other women in her position.

LU: Also, why is the speaker so compelled to the “other” versions of herself. First, these versions are human: “I dream another me exists in the burning house, reading aloud from what I have written” (16). Then non-human and storied: “I am a broken mirror. Shattered glass. . . . But somehow in the dream I’ve grown wings. Tell me, does this change everything” (21)?

KMD: When writing Vow, I was very interested in the instability of the individual self. For me, this question is inextricable from the other concerns that the book addresses — questions about gender, identity, and marginal spaces. Throughout the collection, the speaker of the poems is haunted by other potential or possible versions of herself, that for one reason or another, were never fully realized. I was very interested in exploring why some of these possible selves remained mere possibilities, relegated in the end to marginal spaces. In the examples you cite, the speaker has been unable to actualize these truer versions of her identity, because they remain incongruous with the rhetoric surrounding marriage, womanhood, and femininity. 

LU: With that said, there is also a modern spin in this book, especially in how the speaker discusses film, which is clearly an anachronism.  Why does she focus on films?  Are films something you think about a lot as a writer. (Films are one of my favorite things next to books because they too are a story). She says, “In a film version of this story, I wandered a corridor filled with locked rooms:  endless foyers, a nursery, the master suite” (14).

KMD: Is it connected to the story we tell ourselves. The way we long for the movie version of life — the costumes, the soundtrack and love in its the purest, unadulterated love. What is your favorite movie? What do you imagine would be the speaker’s favorite movie?

You’re absolutely right that the films the speaker imagines in the book are “movie versions of life.” I thought of the films that the heroine imagined as a kind of daydream. I’m fascinated by dreams that function as projections — of emotions, of personal identity, relationships, or interior transformations that often go unnoticed by others.  I’m very interested in how individuals choose to represent purely interior events, often completely intangible and abstract in nature, through concrete visual means. More often than not, the laws of physics or time no longer hold, as this is what feels most true to the experience. In this respect, the work of dreams and film is much like the work of poetry.

With that in mind, I think the speaker’s favorite movie would likely be What Dreams May Come. My favorite, however, will always be The Royal Tenenbaums.

LU: I LOVE THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS!! Okay, let’s detour into literary theory, something I rarely say, but I feel Vow has a sort of voyeuristic element to it, in which the reader watches this woman deal with grief and loss. She sees herself. I see myself, and it makes me remember learning about Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory and her focus on “the male gaze.” Here, this speaker, this woman, is someone to feel sympathetic towards, but she can also be argued as being a spectacle, or an object of desire for the opposite sex.  Do you see a connection to Mulvey at all ?

KMD: Yes, absolutely. But I was also heavily influenced by feminist models of psychoanalysis, particularly those that seek to create a more egalitarian model of psychoanalysis. I think that, in addition to being seen as an object of desire by others, the woman in the poems is experiencing herself as another. And for her, this ability to see herself from another’s perspective becomes a tremendous source of insight and personal transformation. Sigmund Freud described the mind as a text, and for him, the process of analyzing the patient was like literary interpretation. The speaker of the poems in Vowseeks to take power from the hands of others who seek to interpret her grief, her femininity, and her trauma, and become both analyst and analysand.

LU: Every story is based on another story. This is a vow us writers secretly take. We may not be aware but in every story lies archetypes of another. In Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, a fantastical story about love, loss and myth, she discusses fate: “perhaps I could’ve changed our fate, for fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. I should have killed her and found us a different story” (7). Would your speaker have changed her fate if she could? Would she lived a different story? So much of our life as women is dictated, but the power we have is in choosing. Every decision opens a door, or room. In every decision, we take a vow.

KMD: I love this question. In spite of the book’s feminist stance, and my interest in received literary forms, language, and gender, I don’t think that a different narrative arc would solve the speaker’s problems. I say this because the traditional roles of wife, mother, and bride are so inscribed into the culture, that women are still haunted by them. Even if the speaker had taken a path of resistance, she would have still been plagued by other possible selves. What if she had acquiesced to the demands of culture? Would she be happier? There’s only so much an individual can do. At some point the culture needs to change as well.