Double Jinx

by Nancy Reddy

Overview

“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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571319388
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	98
File size:	677 KB

About the Author

Nancy Reddy's poems have been published in 32 Poems, Tupelo Quarterly, and Best New Poets of 2011 (selected by D.A. Powell), with poems forthcoming in Post Road and New Poetry from the Midwest. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin, where she is currently a doctoral candidate in composition and rhetoric. She lives in Madison, WI.

Table of Contents

1 Ex Machina 3

Divine and Mechanical Bodies 4

The Case of the Double Jinx 6

Understudy 10

Possible and Impossible Sentences 11

Little, Red 12

Girl-Terrarium 14

Lucy in Chrysalis 15

Big Valley's Last Surviving Beauty Queen 17

Cinderella Story 19

Before the Catalog of Boats 20

Why the McKean County Lifeguards Left Town 22

Paper Anniversary 23

A Theory of Disaster 24

2 My Girlhood Apothecary 27

Genealogy 28

Family Portrait with Rosary and Steak Knife 29

Genealogy 31

Portrait of my Father as a Young Man with a Bludgeon 32

In Language School My Father Learns to Pass for Dutch 33

My Father Flying Home From War, 1975 34

Genealogy 35

Games 36

Lent 37

3 Our Wilderness Period 41

Before and After, Botched 48

Still Life with Mannequin and Leg of Lamb 49

Fire Plan 50

Frontier Thesis 52

Rabbit Starvation 53

Inventing the Body 54

4 Bad Magic 61

We Won't Make it to the Talkies 62

Vigil 63

Friendly Letter 64

Horses Dream of Horses 65

All Good Girls Deserve 67

Fervent Missive 69

Revisionist Love Story 70

Birds Keep Nothing in Their Bones 72

Unsent Defense 74

Cutting Nature at the Joint 75

Come Fetch 76

The Secret Nancy 78

Editorial Reviews

07/20/2015
In her debut collection, Reddy plays with a variety of forms as she weaves sharp images and dark narratives about femininity, faith, and family. Exploring the sinister side of girlhood/womanhood, Reddy imagines Nancy Drew facing off with a lookalike: “She’s a foxtrot. She’s a jinx and you can’t speak,” or perhaps “she’s the real Nancy/ and you’re a costume party.” Addressing the more quotidian anxiety of female adolescence, one poem’s subject is reminded of how “Saturdays were dancing days” when the “boys danced slow with other girls, your homely cousins/ and your classmates.” There are allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Helen of Troy, whose less-pretty sister “stays home and simmers.” A series of epistles alternately address a former lover and his current partner, and Reddy also investigates a familial cycle of violence: “For a year my father beat anything that moved,” and “My father’s father was a woodstove. He snapped and roared.” In the sonnet crown “Our Wilderness Period,” she delivers a bleak parable about belief, sin, and a people abandoned by God for which the speaker, another jealous sister, feels responsible. Reddy channels the vibe and energy of Plath and Sexton, but it’s her arresting language that’s the real draw here. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise 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

From the Publisher

10/15/2015
Reddy's first collection, selected by Alan Lemon for the National Poetry Series, features a creepy Nancy Drew caught up with a slippery doppelganger. Entries such as "The Case of the Double Jinx" and "The Secret Nancy," which have delicious subtitles such as "The Clue in the Breakfast Nook," "The Case of the Disappearing Husbands," and "The Clue at the Abandoned Drive- In," showcase Reddy's affinity for the long poem. Her taut line moves quickly, often with internal rhyme and smart enjambments: "Nancy knows/ good girls wear gloves to drive/ and wash the dishes, wear slips and stockings/ under summer dresses. She won't. She's off the plot." Reddy's topic is buffeted female identity and its warring personae, as she moves from beauty queen to Cinderella, from a religious pilgrim to magician's assistant to the discovery of the oldest human fossil: "Her bones became a body/ in their hands." Although a few poems lean toward the maudlin, the best show intelligence, spirit, and a good ear. VERDICT A strong first book prize winner that takes up female identity as shaped by the inseparable maelstroms of girlhood and intimacy.—Ellen Kaufman, New York

Library Journal