Jeannine Hall Gailey

An absolutely dumbfounding collection of poetry that will lay you down in your grave on every page. This is a collection about mortality, about time, about the pandemic, about what fills your thoughts when the last minutes of your life tick away. For me, reading this book had to be done slowly, even as my eyes ran ahead to see what would come next. It was too rich, too potent, too portentous to be consumed at pace.

Some are riveting, some are terrifying, some are haunting. This is a book to show more be contemplated in quiet moments. Peruse at your own risk. show less

Jeannine Hall Gailey's Becoming the Villainess is a unique volume of poetry housing poems stemming in Greek mythology to comic book characters.

Gailey's images are crisp and immediate with recurring uses of pomegranates, wolves, and other items. Alice in Wonderland, Wonder Woman, Persephone, and many more make appearances in Becoming the Villainess, which is separated into five parts. At the end of the book, Gailey includes brief descriptions of the myths inspiring the poems enclosed within show more its pages.

From "Female Comic Book Superheroes" (Page 5)

Impossible chests burst out of tight leather jackets,
from which they extract the hidden scroll, antidote, or dagger,
tousled hair covering one eye.

They return to their day jobs as forensic pathologists,
wearing their hair up and donning dainty glasses.
Of all the goddesses, these pneumatic heroines most

resemble Artemis, with her miniskirts and crossbow,
or Freya, with her giant gray cats.
Each has seen this apocalypse before.

Each section in Becoming the Villainess examines the evolution of female characters from innocent girls to darker, vengeful women, but these characters are deeper than stereotypical comic book characters, mothers, and goddesses. While some of these poems have a lighter, tongue-in-cheek quality to them, some of them drive home the deep dark horrors found in many legends, myths, and real-life events. One particularly jarring poem in the collection is "RememberingPhilomel," in which a professor is asking for grittier details of the narrator's sexual assault.

Becoming the Villainess by Jeannine Hall Gailey is a wonderfully insightful collection that looks beneath the surface of myths and sexy comic book characters to find their motivation, their desires, and spunk. show less

Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the 2015 Moon City Poetry Award, delivers a whimsical look at our culture’s obsession with apocalypse as well as a thoughtful reflection on our resources in the face of disasters both large and small, personal and public. Pop-culture characters—from Martha Stewart and Wile E. Coyote to zombie strippers and teen vampires—deliver humorous but insightful commentary on survival and resilience through poems that span imagined scenarios that are show more not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. The characters face their apocalypses in numerous ways, from strapping on rollerblades and swearing to taking notes as barns burn on the horizon. At the end of the world, the most valuable resource is human connection—someone holding our hands, reminding us “we are miraculous.” show less

A dark and playful collection of poems about dramatic endings and the ways stories choose to continue despite a convenient end. These poems roam widely around the blasted wastes, the barren plains of the near future, finding something to enliven and inspire. The reader will be charmed by these grim verses and dwell upon their foreboding stanzas long after the covers have closed again.