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The Bad Wife Handbook
Wesleyan University Press
Reviewed in The New York Sun
Reviewed in The Los Angeles Times
Reviewed in The Sacramento News and Review
Named one of the Best Books of Poetry in 2007 by Library Journal
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Rachel Zucker's third book of
poems is a darkly comic collection that
looks unsparingly at the difficulties
and compromises of married life.
Formally innovative and blazingly
direct, The Bad Wife Handbook crossexamines
marriage, motherhood,
monogamy, and writing itself. Her
upending of grammatical and syntactic
expectations lends these poems an
urgent richness and aesthetic
complexity that mirrors the puzzles
of real life. Candid, subversive, and
genuinely moving, The Bad Wife
Handbook is an important portrait of
contemporary marriage and the
writing life, of emotional connection
and disconnection, of togetherness
and aloneness. It is a new kind of
Confessionalism, a fearless engagement
with truth and telling, a treatise on
what it means to say or to keep secret,
an investigation into the uncanny ways
writing renders the self both more
and less visible. |
"Zucker has the confessionalist's knack for turning personal and difficult into universal and transcendent,
and the experimentalist's gift for fearless, associative play. The combination is unsettling and groundbreaking:
a vitally necessary book for our age."
-Arielle Greenberg, author of My Kafka Century
"I love this book's fearless engagement with the impossibility of marriage; gorgeously Zucker combines
prosaic thoroughness with stopped-time incandescence. If The Bad Wife Handbook is the manifesto for
a new movement, sign me up!"
-Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films: New Poems
Buy online or order direct from
University Press New England.
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