Lizzie Borden in Love

Poem's in Women's Voices

Julianna Baggott

Paper, 0-8093-2725-2 $14.95t
978-0-8093-2725-6
80 pages, 6x9
Poetry
Copublished with Crab Orchard Review
Crab Orchard Series in Poetry–Editor’s Choice Award
Jon Tribble, series editor

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Women’s voices offering an intimate view into women’s lives

Lizzie Borden in Love, a collection of poems by national bestselling author Julianna Baggott, offers poignant commentary in the voices of women as varied as Mary Todd Lincoln and Monica Lewinsky. The poems often focus on a particular moment in life: Katherine Hepburn discovers the dead body of her brother in an attic, or painter Mary Cassatt mourns the failure of her eyesight. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes ecstatic, the poems in this collection never fail the trust of the subjects of their intimate portrayals

 

Camille Claudel Does Not Want to See the Baby

I have been humbled, this hunching
to the piecemeal stitches of a skull
not passing through but rising
from my own seam.
What shocks--the wet moss
of black hair.
I can hear the nursemaid
hushing a mouth that rings out.
       Noise is swept to the corners;
the broom propped by the door
Night is a dark cherry
       pressed by the throat of Day.
I remind myself that I did not want
to be a mother
                 (like my mother),
but how stubborn that small moment
of seeing--the baby, balling up,
knowing the world's keen eye
is upon him--knees springing
to his blotched chest,
                 feet folded in prayer.

 

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“Julianna Baggott amazes with the scope of her imagination. Part biographer, part ventriloquist, part genius, she inhabits characters we thought we knew—from Katharine Hepburn toHelen Keller. In reopening their lives, she is reopening history, retelling it intimately and urgently and wisely in the voices of the women themselves.Baggott's talent is almost spooky. Lizzie Borden in Love is a dangerous and elegant collection from one of America's finest young poets.”—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Great with Child and Tender Hooks

"With crispness and casual elegance, Baggott inhabits a startling variety of personalities and idioms. These monologues are always humanist, poetic without being poeticized, and unpreachily feminist."
—Daisy Fried, author of My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again

"Baggott's positively oracular channeling of voices as diverse as Camille Claudel and Monica Lewinsky is so canny and artfully authentic that it seems possible that the poet here has truly acted as a spiritual medium for the muted and misrepresented voices she illuminates. This is a brilliant book and an essential read for both lovers of poetry and scholars wishing to understand the inheritance of silence that is the complicated birthright of contemporary women artists everywhere.”
—Erin Belieu, author of One Above and One Below and Black Box

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Julianna Baggott is the author of the collection of poems This Country of Mothers (published by Southern Illinois University Press) and four novels—the national bestseller Girl Talk, The Miss America Family, The Madam, and Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions, cowritten with Steve Almond. She also writes novels for younger readers under the pen name N. E. Bode. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications including the Best American Poetry series, Glamour, Ms., Poetry, and TriQuarterly. Baggott holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and teaches at Florida State University in the Creative Writing Program and Film School. She lives in Florida with her husband and their three children.