Laura Madeline Wiseman’s Threnody (Porkbelly Press, 2014) defies categorization. The fourteen micro-pieces float between genres, which creates a reading experience as mysterious and ethereal as the subject matter. The chapbook is a beautiful rendition of some of the most conflicting and uncomfortable female experiences, personified through lady death and her death cart.... You don’t just…
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Threnody Bhattacharjee
Threnody (from the Greek word thrēnōidia implying lament) is set in New Mexico and narrates the journey of the protagonist “I” who meets lady death, befriends her, and rides in her death cart. Wiseman is a brilliant poet, and this can be seen in the manner in which she constructs the fourteen micro-pieces. All of…
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First Ostriker
Who is Lilith? Is she the mythic first wife of Adam, who escaped subservience to her husband and her husband’s God and became stigmatized as a demoness? Or is she an ordinary woman preoccupied with gardening, cyberspace, irritation at the requirements of “pretty” and ready to choose herself? Does she know that sometimes “words stand…
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Men Darling
Men and their Whims, offers readers a thought-provoking relationship between form and content. Evocative vignettes of Civil War love, loss, and trauma are presented in beautifully crafted couplets, tercets, and prose passages. Within these pristinely wrought historical portraits, Wiseman gives us with a poignant fragmentation of meaning, calling our attention to the inherent instability of…
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