Nancy Reddy

Poems

Pocket Universe

Emily Pérez

The Long Devotion is a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts that celebrates motherhood and creates a space, as poet Molly Spencer has written, to “tell an unlovely truth about family life and not have to take it back.” The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences. They write about encountering the world anew through their children; intersections of parenting and race; single parenting; adoptive, foster, and step-parenting; life with chronic illness, mental illness, and disability; and the choice to remain childless. The book is divided into four parts. “Difficulty, Ambivalence, and Joy” considers the wonder and challenges of parenting—including infertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, and life with children—and trying to write in the midst of those demands. “The Body and the Brain” explores the cerebral and bodily labor of caregiving and writing. “In the World” brings parents and their children into contact with the natural and political landscape. Finally, “Transitions” looks at how parenting and writing change as children grow up. Poems range from linear narratives and imagistic lyric to poetry comics, speculative futures, and experimental forms. Essays and poems suggest ways to write through the disruptions and chaos of family life. Prompts invite readers to use the work in this book as a starting point for their own poetry. As candid accounts of motherhood become more prevalent across literary, pop culture, and digital spaces, the way we talk about writing and mothering is changing. Poets have long challenged traditional motherhood narratives. This book brings together a new generation of exciting and provocative voices for the first time.

Poets Writing Motherhood

The Long Devotion

Carmen Giménez Smith

Camille T. Dungy

Long Devotion

“Dark narratives about femininity . . . Reddy channels the vibe and energy of Plath and Sexton, but it’s her arresting language that’s the real draw here.” —Publishers Weekly Double 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 doppelgänger. 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 ourselves, 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.” “Exquisitely crafted poems . . . an exploration of woman’s manifold selves.” —Rebecca Dunham, author of Cold Pastoral

Double Jinx

Nancy Reddy

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