Description
Book SynopsisMicheline Maylor’s The Bad Wife is an intimate, first-hand account of how to ruin a marriage. This is a story of divorce, love, and what should have been, told in a brave and unflinching voice. Pulling the reader into a startling web of sensuality, guilt, resentment, and pleasure, this collection asks: what if you set off a bomb in your own house? What if you lose love and destroy everything you ever knew? These poems have a disarming immediacy, full of surprising imagery, dark humour, and the bold thoughts of a vibrant and flawed protagonist. Balancing a need for wildness and the space to dwell, The Bad Wife explores the taut confines of those vivid, earthly pleasures that we all know and sometimes can’t escape. I forgot the oath: Do no harm. -from “Yesterday, I Went to the Market”
Trade Review"These poems will wreck your home, wake you up with their noisy sex, devastate like a Wall Street banker on a Saturday night bender. These poems will sober you up in the morning with the strength of flowers, of prayer flags. These poems understand everything you’ve lived through. They show you where you live." -- Susan Musgrave, author of Origami Dove
"Micheline Maylor is Canada’s Anne Sexton. To understand The Bad Wife, imagine Sexton on stage in 'cum-fuck-me-shoes,' perhaps chain-smoking, belting out Walt Whitman’s lost one-woman show about Helen of Troy. Linguistically inventive, surreal, playful, and ruthlessly honest, Maylor wades into the swamp of divorce, emerging with almost unbearable images of humiliation, devastation, joy, and praise. 'I’ve been,' she exclaims, 'a home wrecker, / witch, savior, mentor, mother. Let me tell you, I have been all / those things.' In these confessional poems, Maylor—without a whiff of virtue signaling—places her own psyche and body under the microscope, as great artists do." -- John Wall Barger, author of The Mean Game
"By turns ornithological, scatological, geological, and meteorological imagery thread the poems together in a firsthand account of a midlife crisis, surreal and psychological, that fascinates with its psychic energy and playfulness." Gillian Harding-Russell, Arc Poetry, June 2023 [Full review at https://arcpoetry.ca/editorials/the-crows-salvage-and-redemption-micheline-maylors-the-bad-wife]
Table of ContentsContents 1 How to Become a Bad Wife 2 Epithalamion: The Grand Canyon was a Long Way Down 3 The Mean Game 4 Yesterday, I went to the market 5 The Crow Takes the Body 6 Scrapbook 7 Your Motto 8 The Sleep 9 The Bad Wife’s Ankle 10 Two Men 11 How To Become A Bad Mother 12 (N)Ever Thought 13 How to Have Encounters with Foxes 14 The Danger of Georgian Guest Houses 15 The Bad Wife’s Clavicle 16 The Pine Siskin 17 And Let’s Not Forget Christina Lake 18 The Crow Gives a Body 19 The Bad Wife’s Vulva 20 Portrait of My Life as a Nurse Log 21 Guilt 22 Divorce Sudoku 23 So, Say I 24 The Moral Responsibility to be Intelligent 25 This is My 21st Wedding Anniversary 26 Don’t Feed the Animals 27 She tells me 28 There is No Word 29 Reasons for My Husband’s Inattentiveness 30 Styx and Stones 31 Vagabond 32 How to Be a Bad Ex-Wife 33 Double Fisting 34 Become 35 No Matter the Shape of Things, You are Much Missed 36 Inclement Weather 40 Omen: Calla Lilies 73 Notes 75 Acknowledgements 77 Prologue: On Our First/Last Toast 79 Epilogue
