The Book of Hulga

by Rita Mae Reese
illustrated by Julie Franki

University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
Paper: 978-0-299-30814-8
Library of Congress Classification PS3618.E4424A6 2016
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The Book of Hulga speculates—with humor, tenderness, and a brutal precision—on a character that Flannery O’Connor envisioned but did not live long enough to write: “the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” These striking poems look to the same sources that O’Connor sought out, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Edgar Allan Poe to Simone Weil. Original illustrations by Julie Franki further illuminate Reese’s imaginative verse biography of a modern-day hillbilly saint.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rita Mae Reese is the author of the poetry collection The Alphabet Conspiracy. A past Wallace Stegner Fellow, she lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

REVIEWS

“Like the peacock lifting that magnificent tail into an arch, Rita Mae Reese’s poems of affliction and epiphany shiver and extend a structure so stunning, so moving, it’s nearly impossible to respond justly in language. Flannery O’Connor would have kept The Book of Hulga on her bedside table.”—Amy Newman, author of Dear Editor

“A mesmerizing imagination at work. The language is pared but rich, philosophical and earthy. These poems are fiercely individual, but dovetail into a narrative bright with revelations and wonder. The Book of Hulga is a triumph.”—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning

“To read these poems is to inhabit the body of a penitent climbing, on hands and knees, the long stone steps toward God. The book’s three crowns of finely interwoven sonnets leave no doubt that Reese is an equal to Donne or Hopkins.”—Nick Lantz, author of We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

0
Feast Day

1
The Given Lines
Revising History
The Reward
J-O-B
With Regina at Lourdes
The margin is for the Holy Ghost
Isn’t

2
How to Lose a Leg
What Her Mother Knew When She Heard
Welcome to Milledgeville
Hulga’s Fairy Tales
On the Problems of Empathy
In Which She Reads the Humorous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
First Dream
Phenomenology of Sow
Exegesis: The Tempest
Hulga as Sara in The Book of Tobit Who, Possessed of a Demon, Was Given Seven Husbands and Killed Each on Their Wedding Nights

3
Milledgeville
Hazel Motes’s Sonnet
Your Body Is a Temple of the Holy Ghost
The Lame Shall Enter First
The Life You Save
A Bird Sanctuary
Moral Error Theory
Interlude: The Case of the Missing Virgin
The Red Clay Virgin
The Vanishing Point
Hide & Seek
Immaculate
At 36, Hulga Speaks of Love
Immaculate Rejections
Second Dream

4
Casting Call for Temps Mort
Interior of Hayloft, Day
After Hours of Staring Out at the Pond
Because She Wanted
Mrs. Freeman Knows the Signs
Birth
Post-op

5
The Grandmother’s Sonnet
Manley Pointer’s Sonnet
The Misfit’s Sonnet
Displaced
There’s wood enough within
Learning to Pray. Again
Everything That Rises

6
After Flannery’s Death, Regina Cleans Her Room
Flannery O’Connor’s Peacocks Go to Heaven after She Dies
Pieta with Regina
Flannery, Are You Grieving?

Appendix: Quotes from Simone Weil
Notes

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