Description
Book SynopsisDouble 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."
Trade ReviewPraise for Double Jinx: "Double Jinx swirls luminously through genealogy, the dark gifts of a mother and absent father, a grandmother "who wrapped the boys in rugs and propped them up / before the fire," Little Red Riding Hood, Nancy Drew, Lucy the missing link, or the servitude that here comes with being "the girl you love / and not the runner-up" in "Miss Small Town USA," who, after it is returned from the cleaners, hangs up her body "with the winter coats, between the fox fur & the camel hair." Double Jinx is a brilliant first book, profound and fierce." -- Alex Lemon, author of The Wish Book "With enormous imaginative energy, Double Jinx offers "a chorus of girls," from daughter to sister to wife, from Nancy Drew to the girls in fairy tales, to a beauty queen, to a girl who lives in a terrarium. This is an exhilarating, beautiful book." -- Nicole Cooley, author of Breach "Reddy is the most deft of magicians. She'll "have your heart," and, "before the curtain falls," she'll "pluck it from your chest/ like a rabbit from a hat." -- Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Bone Map "Nancy Reddy's exquisitely crafted poems perform an exploration of woman's manifold selves. Using the conceit of the stage, intimate spaces--family, home, the love letter--are lit 'bright as a spotlight' by the poet's eye, compelling us to examine questions of self-identity, desire, and escape. Double Jinx is a book that holds its audience spellbound." -- Rebecca Dunham, author of Glass Armonica
