Every Girl Becomes the Wolf

Press: Finishing Line Press
Date:2018
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THIRD PLACE CHAPBOOK AWARD WINNER OF THE 2019 ELGIN AWARD

Cover Art by Katy Horan

Collaboratively written with Andrea Blythe, this chapbook explores the received images of the feminine in fairy tales. The women and girls in Every Girl Becomes the Wolf resist the common tropes of red riding hoods, gilded mirrors, and iced palaces. Every girl becomes the wolf because every girl has the power to tear apart the cultural conceit of wicked stepmoms, heartless mothers, and voracious monsters. Witches, hags, and mothers of damaged creatures from myth, movies, and lore prowl through this poetry. Lilith settles in to enjoy the county fair rib-off, Grendel’s mother holds her son close, and the Sphynx bears the weight of mythic secrets. Mothers demand their own freedom, daughters refuse gendered expectations, and wives leave what spoils with rot behind. As they wrestle with their place in these stories, they transform into figures outside of the victims or villains they have been perceived to be.

Andrea Blythe and Laura Madeline Wiseman howl in ferocious harmony in their chapbook Every Girl Becomes the Wolf. In prose poems, pantoums, and every kind of poetry in between, they re-envision the roles of women and girls. The subvert assumptions and assume subversion. This is one gutsy duo here to help us navigate and survive these difficult times.
– Denise Duhamel

Praise for Every Girl Becomes the Wolf

Wolf Goss

With vivid, sensual imagery, Every Girl Becomes the Wolf captures the dark heart of fairy tales and myths, retelling them from the perspectives of witches and wicked queens, Medusa and Baba Yaga, showing us their hungers and desires, their triumphs and transformations. Laura Madeline Wiseman and Andrea Blythe's lyrical magic resurrects ancient stories to create a splendid tapestry of women's voices. This is a raw, beautiful, necessary collection. –Theodora Goss

Wolf Agodon

In Every Girl Becomes the Wolf, Andrea Blythe and Laura Madeline Wiseman shatter stereotypes and old stories through poems that pull you in with their imagery, voice, and imagination. In this beautifully written chapbook where People fill spaces with their sweat and sorrow—parlors/or bedrooms or chambers within others’ bodies, their voices are woven so seamlessly together, you don’t know where Blythe begins or Wiseman continues. Collaborations tend to pull the best from each poet and this chapbook does that. As a reader, you will open this book and linger, dappled in the woods of distracted adventure, and these poems will be your map of retellings, of transformations, where the moonlight lilts with hope; you will be thankful for the time you were lost in their words. – Kelli Russell Agodon

Wolf Lé

Marked by wide-ranging imaginative empathy and a cracklingly strong polyphony of feminist voices, this noctilucent collection achieves its ambitious objective of making visible "all the artistry of hauntings." Whether the speaker is a meteor-like ghost longing to "fall into you," a fairytale witch mulling on the societal pressures burdening both childless women and mothers, or a suicide survivor exploring the nuances of loss in the social-media age, these poems are rich with romantic lyricism, a wistful awareness of the "wetware churn of loss" and of kisses "returned, some years, some centuries too late." When you finish reading this chapbook, you, too, will believe that "The magic is in the living." – Jenna Lé

Wolf Duhamel

Andrea Blythe and Laura Madeline Wiseman howl in ferocious harmony in their chapbook Every Girl Becomes the Wolf. In prose poems, pantoums, and every kind of poetry in between, they re-envision the roles of women and girls. The subvert assumptions and assume subversion. This is one gutsy duo here to help us navigate and survive these difficult times. – Denise Duhamel

Laura Madeline Wiseman

Every Girl Becomes the Wolf