ABOUT THIS BOOK

A stroll through deceptively tranquil spaces and the restlessness of social convention

Depicting the uneasy performance of class and femininity in the stilted, suffocating spaces of a social life suffused with English propriety, Megan J. Arlett’s The Garden Party is a poetic meditation on desire and agency. From the imagined space of the titular garden party to the interior of an art gallery, from the rolling hills of Sussex to Trinidad under British colonial rule, Arlett paints the conventions of polite society as both strange and arbitrary, allowing the restlessness of the poems’ speakers to rise to the surface. Through free verse, received forms, and ekphrasis, these poems stage a conversation with other artists, eras, and art media, moving through natural and constructed locations that are sometimes historical and often imagined. This collection considers what it means to love a place despite its histories and flaws and offers ways of navigating this tension through art. The Garden Party is a striking yet quiet rebellion against order and expectation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

MEGAN J. ARLETT was born in the UK, grew up in Spain, and now lives in New Mexico. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2019, Best New British and Irish Poets 2018, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

REVIEWS

“The Garden Party is a dreamy, moody book about art and desire and place and the past, full of wit and surprise and casual glamour, like a hedgerow tattoo, and a little bit of danger, like a paternoster lift. ‘I want to be that kind of marvelous,’ Arlett writes. ‘I want / to know all the forces one can call spirit.’” —Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self

“Filled with delightful strangeness, Arlett’s poems show women as both desiring and desired, sometimes even hunted. These poems made me want to read them aloud and go write more of my own. This book is a gift.” —Katie Manning, author of Hereverant

“Imagine a fête with the very best people: Sylvia Plath, Freddie Mercury, Virginia Woolf, Ada Lovelace, your grandmother. Imagine a trance arboretum, where sleeping ‘peacocks / dream like coats in snow,’ where ‘croquet bridges [are] sprung / like snares,’ and you are a ‘rare sea creature in an evening gown,’ who is learning how to love. The Garden Party is your invitation to fall down the rabbit hole and awaken anew, to fall back in love with the world you only thought you knew. Megan J. Arlett writes with a radical aliveness. I would follow her into any dimension, RSVP in hand.” —Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Erase Genesis

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I.

Cordial Invitation

The Garden Party

Smoke Goddess/Woman with Orange Flares

Aubade with Calf

Mingle

Boxing Day Hunt

Cajole

Genesis

Bodily Curation

Mingle

II.

Fresh Meat

The Fifth Marquess of Anglesey

As Sylvia Plath Dies, My Grandfather Cycles to Work

in London

Mingle

Freddie Mercury Rehearses with The Royal Ballet, 1979

Five Pragues

Ode to the Round-Headed Rampion

S. S. Iberia, 1960

Sitting with My Grandmother in Kingston, East Sussex

I Ask My Grandmother What Trinidad Was Like in 1960

How It Happens

Ordinary Acts of Heroism

Turn of the Millenium

Almanac

III.

Exhibit in 24 Frames

Solstice

Mingle

1973 from Sussex to Aintree

Mingle

Magnum Opus

Haverfordwest Women’s Hospital, 1955

Welsh Lullaby

Dancing Cheek to Cheek

The Shipping Forecast

In the Wings at Glyndebourne Opera

Cleansed

A Little Party Never Killed Nobody

Mingle

Razor

Paternoster

On Learning Ada Lovelace’s Father Was Lord Byron

The Magician’s Assistant Reveals Her Secrets

Tate Britain Post Appointment at the American Embassy

December, West Sussex

Notes

Acknowledgments