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2 books match the query 'Earley, Deja'
Baring Witness
36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and MarriageEdited by Holly Welker
University of Illinois Press, 2016
In Baring Witness, Holly Welker and thirty-six Mormon women write about devotion and love and luck, about the wonder of discovery, and about the journeys, both thorny and magical, to humor, grace, and contentment. They speak to a diversity of life experiences: what happens when one partner rejects Church teachings; marrying outside one's faith; the pain of divorce and widowhood; the horrors of spousal abuse; the hard journey from visions of an idealized marriage to the everyday truth; sexuality within Mormon marriage; how the pressure to find a husband shapes young women's actions and sense of self; and the ways Mormon belief and culture can influence second marriages and same-sex unions. The result is an unflinching look at the earthly realities of an institution central to Mormon life.
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To the Mormon Newlyweds Who Thought the Bellybutton Was Somehow Involved
Deja Earley
Signature Books, 2018
This extraordinary poetry collection opens with the author as a little girl delighted with the jewelry being sold by a vendor along the beach, unaware that the bowtied rabbit earrings symbolize the Playboy empire.
In navigating her life as a free-spirited Mormon, each of Earley’s poems expresses the tension she feels in adhering to and expanding the confines of her faith. From awkward first kisses shared on a church couch to refusing to talk to men who are not Mormon “lest I fall from grace, on my ass,” her poems remain funny, wry, thoughtful. Despite the promise not to talk to non-Mormon men, her final poems detail her marriage to a Catholic husband who offers Hail Mary prayers after a lost pregnancy while she struggles to find comfort from an elusive Mother in Heaven. Despite their differences and moments of heartache, they thrive, allowing themselves to “imagine we’re floating in bright bubbles of light.” It is an emotional roadmap for anyone else facing such tensions, joys, and accommodations.
In navigating her life as a free-spirited Mormon, each of Earley’s poems expresses the tension she feels in adhering to and expanding the confines of her faith. From awkward first kisses shared on a church couch to refusing to talk to men who are not Mormon “lest I fall from grace, on my ass,” her poems remain funny, wry, thoughtful. Despite the promise not to talk to non-Mormon men, her final poems detail her marriage to a Catholic husband who offers Hail Mary prayers after a lost pregnancy while she struggles to find comfort from an elusive Mother in Heaven. Despite their differences and moments of heartache, they thrive, allowing themselves to “imagine we’re floating in bright bubbles of light.” It is an emotional roadmap for anyone else facing such tensions, joys, and accommodations.
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