ABOUT THIS BOOK

In this inventive collection, Julianna Baggott invites readers to reconsider basic assumptions about language, faith, motherhood, and love. With a sharply honed voice featuring parentheticals that often comment on and sometimes undercut what has come before, these poems whirl through contemporary America, engaging with topics as diverse and timely as Russian mail-order brides, Internet bullying, and school shootings.

Alongside her cultural commentary, the speaker frankly confronts love and sex, as well as the beauty and brutality of having children. Still other poems reflect questions and considerations of faith: the speaker ponders St. Thomas in a pet store and imagines Jesus explaining to God how it feels to have a body.

Baggott’s use of obsolete Old English words subverts common language and creates new ways of interrogating the world around us. There is heartache on these pages, but Baggott also offers humor, such as a complaint about a lover’s eating habits or an extended discourse on a baby’s rattle. Baggott’s latest proves to be a rollicking book sui generis.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Julianna Baggott is the author of over twenty books, three of which are collections of poetry—This Country of Mothers, Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees, and Lizzie Borden in Love. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, Agni, and the Southern Review, and been read on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. She teaches in the Florida State University College of Motion Picture Arts and holds the Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross.

REVIEWS

“Julianna Baggott has always been a poet of inventiveness and sly self-appraisal, and these qualities are abundantly evident in her new collection, which is her best thus far. One almost has to go back to the Metaphysical and Cavalier poets to experience her sassy admixture of erotic and spiritual ardor, and her crackling formal dexterity—a skill that is never merely dutiful, never willing to settle for the easy tour de force. During an era of lukewarm and tepid poetry, Baggott offers poems that sizzle—and sear.”—David Wojahn, author of World Tree

“For years, I’ve looked to Julianna Baggott’s writing as a map to help navigate the crisscrossed highways of the human heart. But in this deliciously weird and extraordinary collection of poems, Baggott outdoes her distinguished self—creating a world where ‘the crawfish could outgrow the glass jars’ and where ‘an arm alone dies then tingles back.’ How I loved returning again and again to these wise poems, which underscore the electric and buoyant bodies that, on our best days, we all try to inhabit."—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Contents
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Your World Is Harder than Mine: Instructions for Children Heading
Off to School 3
Instructions for Our Children, Living among Internet Enemies 4
Today—Bored, Puckered, Lonesome—I Would Like to Order a
Russian Internet Bride: A Trisonetto 5
The Sonetto of Accidental Inventions 7
This Deathy World 8
Poem to Your Wound 9
A Double Sonetto for Pyloric Stenosis 11
Claustrophobia: The Closet’s Perspective 13
Agoraphobia: The Great Outdoors’ Perspective 14
Taxidermy: A Translucent Love Poem 15
Lice: A Mother-Daughter Love Poem 17
A Fibrous Asbestos Sonetto 18
Today, I Turn to Stretch Armstrong for Comfort 19
Sermon on the Mount Today at My Failing Kmart:
A Broken Sonetto 21
After Having Sex on Palm Sunday, Some Clarity 22
My Enemy, Unloved, Has Only Struck One of My Cheeks:
An Interrupted Sonetto 23
I Consider Doubting Thomas at Pet Kare in a Sonetto and
a Half 24
Envy the Atheist in Sonetto 25
I Am Not in the Wilderness but at Home, Weak and Thankless in
Double Sonetto 26
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To My Lover, concerning the Yird-Swine 31
Today, Worn and Broke’t, I Make Demands of My Lover 32
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For Furious Nursing Baby 33
Burial Instructions—Abject & Fuming 34
Concerning My Lover, the Ogerhunch 35
To My Lover, concerning the Shaking of the Bladder Rattle at the
Maid’s Baby 36
To the Rumor-Monger amongst Us 37
Happy Little Death Threats 38
To My Lover, Phrenology Hobbyist 39
To My Lover, about His Bouffage Eating of Meats 40
To My Lover, about His Derelict Neglect of the Gate-Lock 41
To My Lover, concerning a Cure for Barn Swallow Mites 42
To My Lover, My ’Klept 43
To My Lover, His Hair Thick with Bear Grease 44
For My Lover, upon My Impending Death 46
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The Practice of Being a Lamb 49
Jesus Wants to Explain the Body to His Father 50
Jesus Explain‍[s] His Father 52
Mary Magdalene and the Lost Body 54
Of Poor Spirit 55
In Rooms with Baby 56
Aquarium: Love Poem #1 57
Aquarium: Love Poem #2 58
Today, There Is No Time, Only Squalling Squalor 59
Don’t Take Up with the Married Man 60
If You Do Not Eat Enough Omega-3 while Pregnant, the Baby Will
Steal It from Your Brain 61
I Prefer the Earlier You—Dear Reader 62
On the Masochistic Need for Criticism 63
For the Blind Botanist’s Wife 64
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Today, You Leave Me to Go to the Store, but I’m Sure You Won’t
Come Back 65
Today—Hauling a Family on My Back—I Think of Fitzgerald’s
Exquisite Crack-Up: A Resistant Sonetto 67
Interviewers Ask How I Do It 70
As Men Relinquish Their Manliness 71
America—Let Me Be Your Gravedigger: A Disfigured Sonetto 72
When the Girl Becomes the Bear 73
Acknowledgments 75