Cover of Becoming the Villainess

Becoming the Villainess

"In this splendidly entertaining debut, Jeannine Hall Gailey offers us a world both familiar and magical-filled with fairytale and mythology characters that are our own bedfellows-we wake up with Philomel and argue with Ophelia while half-listening to a Snow Queen, amidst Spy Girls, Amazons and Mongolian Cows. The wild and seductive energy in this collection never lets one put the book down. (In fact, any one who opens the collection in the bookstore and reads such poems as The Conversation and Job Requirements: A Supervillain's Advice will want to buy the book!) For her delivery is heart-breaking and refreshing, so the poems seduce us with the sadness, glory and entertainment of our very own days. Propelled by Jeannine Hall Gailey's alert, sensuous, and musical gifts, the mythology becomes all our own." -Ilya Kaminsky, author of the award-winning Dancing in Odessa

Audience
adult
Length
short · 96 pages

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Liked Becoming the Villainess? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Becoming the Villainess. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Magic with Skin On Shares poetry, fantasy, fairy tale
  2. Girl-King Shares poetry, fairy tale
  3. Racing Hummingbirds Shares poetry, unavailable, feminism
  4. The Descent of Alette Shares poetry, feminism, fantasy

“People who read Becoming the Villainess tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Miracle Fruit
  2. Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems
  3. I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems
  4. Mosquito

“If you want more of the same (fantasy about feminism), start with these.”

  1. The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison
  2. Apocrypha
  3. Averno
  4. Helen in Egypt

“If it was the poetry that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. What Are Big Girls Made Of?: Poems
  2. Circles on the Water: Selected Poems
  3. Love Comes First
  4. The Flowering Woman: Becoming and Being

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Echoes
  2. All in the Family: A Look-It-Up Guide to the In-Laws, Outlaws, and Offspring of Mythology
  3. In the Surgical Theatre
  4. Poetical Works: Tennyson