Jeannine Hall Gailey

Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the 2015 Moon City Poetry Award, delivers a whimsical look at our culture's obsession with apocalypse as well as a thoughtful reflection on our resources in the face of disasters both large and small, personal and public. Pop-culture characters--from Martha Stewart and Wile E. Coyote to zombie strippers and teen vampires--deliver humorous but insightful commentary on survival and resilience through poems that span imagined scenarios that are not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. The characters face their apocalypses in numerous ways, from strapping on rollerblades and swearing to taking notes as barns burn on the horizon. At the end of the world, the most valuable resource is human connection--someone holding our hands, reminding us "we are miraculous."

Field Guide to the End of the World

"In this splendidly entertaining debut, Jeannine Hall Gailey offers us a world both familiar and magical-filled with fairytale and mythology characters that are our own bedfellows-we wake up with Philomel and argue with Ophelia while half-listening to a Snow Queen, amidst Spy Girls, Amazons and Mongolian Cows. The wild and seductive energy in this collection never lets one put the book down. (In fact, any one who opens the collection in the bookstore and reads such poems as The Conversation and Job Requirements: A Supervillain's Advice will want to buy the book ) For her delivery is heart-breaking and refreshing, so the poems seduce us with the sadness, glory and entertainment of our very own days. Propelled by Jeannine Hall Gailey's alert, sensuous, and musical gifts, the mythology becomes all our own." -Ilya Kaminsky, author of the award-winning Dancing in Odessa

Becoming the Villainess

"Unexplained Fevers plucks the familiar fairy tale heroines and drops them into alternate landscapes. Unlocking them from the old stories is a way to rescue the other half of [their] souls. And so Sleeping Beauty arrives at the emergency room, Red Riding Hood reaches the car dealership, and Rapunzel goes wandering in the desert - their journeys, re-imagined in this inventive collection of poems, produce other dangers, betrayals and nightmares, but also bring forth great surprise and wonder." - Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of Black Blossoms "Unexplained Fevers begins with that most familiar of phrases, Once upon a time, but the world we find inside these covers is deeply defamiliarized. Trapped by physical ills, cultural expectations, and the constraints of marriage, these heroines interrogate the world and propel themselves through it with cunning and sass. We follow, for example, Jack and Jill though a prose poem where they somehow turned thirty without thunderous applause, after having sworn they would follow each other anywhere, but anywhere turned out to be a lot like Ohio. At the center of these poems - urgent, mysterious, evocative - we find the great topic of all fairy tales, transformation. Read Unexplained Fevers, and be transformed." - Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables Jeannine Hall Gailey is the Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011) which was an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist in 2012. Her work has been featured on NPR s The Writer s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches part-time at the MFA program at National University.

Unexplained Fevers

Poetry. Dazzling in its descriptions of a natural world imperiled by the hidden dangers of our nuclear past, this book presents a girl in search of the secrets of survival. In THE ROBOT SCIENTIST'S DAUGHTER, Jeannine Hall Gailey creates for us a world of radioactive wasps, cesium in the sunflowers, and robotic daughters. She conjures the intricate menace of the nuclear family and nuclear history, juxtaposing surreal cyborgs, mad scientists from fifties horror flicks and languid scenes of rural childhood. Mining her experience growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the writer allows the stories of the creation of the first atomic bomb, the unintended consequences of scientific discovery, and building nests for birds in the crooks of maple trees to weave together a reality at once terrifying and beautiful. THE ROBOT SCIENTIST'S DAUGHTER reveals the underside of the Manhattan Project from a personal angle, and charts a woman's—and America's—journey towards reinvention. "In THE ROBOT SCIENTIST'S DAUGHTER, Jeannine Hall Gailey charts the dangerous secrets in a nuclear family as well as a nuclear research facility. Her ecofeminist approach to the making of bombs, celebrates our fragile natural world. Full of flowers and computers, this riveting poetry captures the undeniable compromises and complexities of our times."—Denise Duhamel "What is her story? 'In this story,' Jeannine Gailey tells us, 'a girl grows up in a field of nuclear reactors. She gives us lessons in poison. And as we watch this heroine appear from various angles, in multiple lights we realize that just like this girl who 'made birds' nests / with mud and twigs, hoping that birds would / come live in them.' Gailey makes an archetype for a contemporary American woman whom she sees as beautiful—and damaged—and proud—and unafraid. And the Scientist? He 'lives alone in a house made of snow. / If he makes music, no one hears it.' America? It builds barbed wire 'to keep enemies out of its dream'—but we all are surrounded by these barbed wires of a country whose 'towns melt into sunsets, into dust clouds, into faces.' In subtle, playful, courageous poems, we are witnessing a brilliant performance."—Ilya Kaminsky "THE ROBOT SCIENTIST'S DAUGHTER gives us a magnificent voice who is at turns 'happy with the apple blossoms,' and yet whip-smart enough to know 'the beauties of voltmeter and oscilloscope.' But underneath the beautifully measured sheen and spark of these bright stanzas, is a human who opens up thrilling new worlds by also fearlessly inhabiting poems of sorrow, survival, and identity—one whose 'tongue is alive with lasers and [whose] song attracts thousands.'"—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

The Robot Scientist's Daughter

Flare, Corona

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SHE RETURNS TO THE FLOATING WORLD (Second Edition) is a book about transformation that examines two recurring motifs in Japanese folk tales and popular culture: "the woman who disappears" and the "older sister/savior." Many of the poems are persona poems spoken by characters from anime and manga, mythology, and fairy tales, like the story of the kitsune, or fox-woman, whose relationships are followed throughout the book. Gailey's abiding interest in female heroes and tales of transformation, love, and loss bristles to life with a cast of characters including wives who become foxes, sisters who become birds, and robots with souls. "I deeply admire the skill with which Jeannine Hall Gailey weaves myth and folklore into poems illuminating the realities of modern life. Gailey is, quite simply, one of my favorite American poets; and She Returns to the Floating World is her best collection yet." --Terri Windling, writer, editor, and artist ("The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror" series, "The Armless Maiden," "The Endicott Studio")

Jeannine Hall Gailey

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