A rebuttal to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Every Form of Ruin posits the Erinyes’ fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra’s rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia’s relegation to a footnoted sacrifice. A fierce and darkly funny examination of anger, these lyrical poems push back against silencing by paying witness to a world where the experiences of women, nonbinary, and femme-identifying people are too often ignored, their responses dismissed as hysterical. These poems are also investigations into the loneliness of mid-life; the search for one’s own self when that self has given its life to service. Every Form of Ruin counters our culture’s erasure of women and resists the categorizations of maiden, mother, crone by blurring those distinctions through the creation of voices that are moved by rage and resistance.
A rebuttal to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Every Form of Ruin posits the Erinyes’ fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra’s rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia’s relegation to a footnoted sacrifice. A fierce and darkly funny examination of anger, these lyrical poems push back against silencing by paying witness to a world where the experiences of women, nonbinary, and femme-identifying people are too often ignored, their responses dismissed as hysterical. These poems are also investigations into the loneliness of mid-life; the search for one’s own self when that self has given its life to service. Every Form of Ruin counters our culture’s erasure of women and resists the categorizations of maiden, mother, crone by blurring those distinctions through the creation of voices that are moved by rage and resistance.
Erin Adair-Hodges is visiting assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Toledo and is the co-creator and curator of the Bad Mouth Reading Series. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, Boulevard, and Green Mou
Cast often through fairytale and myth, Erin Adair-Hodges's new
collection audaciously examines a contemporary experience of
womanhood. Every Form of Ruin is a scalpel, exposing various forms
of gendered violence, the vicissitudes and joys of wifedom and
motherhood ('momming' as the poet brilliantly neologizes), and the
power of sisterhood and of claiming the self in all its multitudes.
There is so much in the craft of these poems equally to admire and
revel in, including Adair-Hodges's seemingly effortlessly inventive
turns of image, line, and phrase. Her tone and the voice of these
poems is also a wonder, at once irreverent, funny, biting, and
downright sad. While the poems square themselves against ruin, they
are actually resplendent, coming to us as they do, from 'a country
in which the poet is the only citizen so, also, its queen.'--Shara
McCallum, author of Madwoman and No Ruined Stone
If you've ever been crammed into a box with a word like 'woman' or
'girl' or 'mother' or 'bossy' or 'bitch' scribbled on the side,
these poems are for you. If you've fought yourself exhausted and
then gotten up to fight some more, this book is for you. If you
love Clytemnestra's courage and would have defended Iphigenia to
the death too, if you know how Cassandra has been talked over and
over or have called upon the Erinyes in your hour of need, these
are the poems you've been waiting for. And if you don't know any of
these legends yet, but want good company in your rage, Every Form
of Ruin will thrill and console and inspire.--Kathryn Nuernberger,
author of RUE and The Witch of Eye
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