Or What We'll Call Desire: Poems

Or What We'll Call Desire: Poems

by Alexandra Teague
Or What We'll Call Desire: Poems

Or What We'll Call Desire: Poems

by Alexandra Teague

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Overview

New poems that showcase high-art and popular culture, vamps and giant artichoke statues, and Freudian Disney dolls in a poignant exploration of cultural and personal legacies.

This heartrending and darkly playful new collection by Alexandra Teague tries to understand the edges of self in a patriarchal culture and in relation to a family history of mental illness and loss. In poems that mix high art and popular culture (from classical Greek statues to giant plaster artichokes, Cubism to Freudian Disney dolls), Teague interweaves self-reflection with the stories and lives of mythic and historic female figures, such as the dangerous-wise witch Baba Yaga and early-20th-century sculptors’ model Audrey Munson—calling across time and place to explore desire, grief, and the representation and misrepresentation of the female form.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780892554997
Publisher: Persea Books
Publication date: 08/20/2019
Pages: 80
Product dimensions: 6.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Teague is the author of two previous books of poetry—Mortal Geography, winner of Persea’s 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders—and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A former Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Alexandra is a professor at University of Idaho.

Table of Contents

Self Portrait as Curious Lunatic's Sketch of a Dancing Girl 3

In the Case of Mlle. Zina Brozia of the Paris Grand Opera Versus M. Jean Metzinger, Cubist 5

The Giant Artichoke 7

End Times 9

Baba Yaga Rides It's a Small World 10

Driving After Rain 11

Requiem for No Hands 13

Ofelia Plays Like a Girl 15

Baba Yaga Appears in Intro to Feminist Theory for an Impromptu Lecture 16

The Hungry Eye 18

Ode to Theda 20

The Altogether 22

The Louvre Saloon, San Jose: Hatchetation, 1903 23

Matryoshka (as Madness) 24

Suicide Notes (as M.C. Escher's Impossible Constructions) 27

Ofelia Has Not Seen Even One of the Seven Wonders of the World, and People Keep Making New Lists 30

At 14, I Would Have Traded Adulthood for a Role in CATS 32

Sketch: Charcoal and Body on Paper 33

Duchamp's Nude Descending Speaks 34

How to Become Stained Glass 35

Ofelia Looks for Anger at the Metropolitan Museum 36

Geodes 38

Letters to Phryne 40

Late American Aubade 50

Spread Spectrum 51

Audrey Munson Committed to the St. Lawrence State Asylum for the Insane, 1931 53

Gem State 54

Tabloid Elegy 56

The Meteorologist Receives More Letters Asking 58

Audrey Munson Reimagines Her Life as Still Life 59

Baba Yaga Invites Fort Worth Girl Scout Troop #23 for a Campout 60

Seine with Pomona: The Goddess of Abundance 62

Notes on the Poems 63

Acknowledgments 65

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