Double Jinx: Poems

By Nancy Reddy and Alex Lemon

“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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781571319388

Nancy Reddy

NANCY REDDY is associate professor of writing and first-year studies at Stockton University. She is the author of Pocket Universe; Double Jinx, a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and the chapbook Acadiana. She lives in Collingswood, New Jersey.

Book preview

1

Ex Machina

The chorus girls descend, their wings a wonder

of feather and zipline. The oboes

in the orchestra pit yawn

as if to gulp them whole, but the girls

are singing and so swallow down

their fear. The villain shows himself

too soon and is all wrong for this play—

not a dashing captain but a pirate

with a stick shift for an arm and a stopwatch

in his heart. Where the audience

should be—the rows of lovely velvet seats

and numbered placards, donated

by the dead or named for them—there’s

only sea. The violinists do a kick turn

and set out into the waves. What happened

to the playwright, to the plot? Who will stitch

the chorus to the theme? Who will,

when the curtain drops, unhook the beauties

from their wings and turn them back

to girls, wrap terrycloth robes around

their sequined bodysuits? We cannot wait

for angels. We’ll be our own gods now.

Watch us swinging from the rafters

like a lifeboat or a bird of prey.

Divine and Mechanical Bodies

The year my sister turned into a crow

I ran the cinder track around the football field for hours. I stayed on

after practice ended, after coach packed up

his whistle and his stopwatch, after the other girls changed back

into sweats and carpooled home. At my house

my sister gathered all the shiny things. She plucked the buttons

from our parkas and strung them from the bedposts,

lined the closet doors with tinfoil and propped the silver-plated serving trays

along the dressers so that everywhere she looked

she’d see her own eyes looking back. She wouldn’t speak.

When our mother called us down to dinner

she answered with a raucous preening call, she piled mall kiosk pendants

around her feathered neck. She wouldn’t eat

the meals our mother cooked and instead slurped juice from cans, clawed

the soft and flaky centers from the caramels

in the cut-glass candy dish our mother kept for guests. She grew

bird-boned and slender, a brittle core inside each inky feather. That year,

though no one had died, not really,

my mother filled the basement freezer with casseroles,

each aluminum dish an archaeological dig of hash browns, beef tips

browned in butter, cream of something soup. In bio lab

we pinned and bisected earthworms, diagrammed their tiny hearts

on worksheets. Somewhere a teacher called out kingdom, phylum, family.

We smeared the cultured cells from petri dishes onto slides and marveled

at their manufactured one-cell lives. I ran the track each afternoon,

my mix tape turned up loud. The sun set

earlier and earlier each day behind the goal posts. At home

my mother diced and browned the onions. My sister

made herself a feather bed. The first snow fell around us as we slept,

flakes soft as down, clotting the trees whose leaves had not yet

turned and fallen, turning the lawn

bright as a spotlight.

The Case of the Double Jinx

THE SCARLET SLIPPER MYSTERY

You’re Nancy Drew and you drive a blue coupe.

You drive fast. Your mother is