Ellen Devlin's Rita is as subversive as it is wise. Rita's sassy "talk backs" to heroines from the canon may be feminist retellings but Devlin's project is more complex. Each insightful warning, discussion, or interrogation (with female characters of carefully chosen seminal texts) explores necessary questions of identity, agency, free will, power, and complicity. These poems are instruments of power--asserting, imagining, describing what it's like to be a woman today. I wish I read this book when I was a young woman. This is no ordinary debut collection; Devlin's attention to craft is masterful and her language fresh and fierce. "The windows and doors are locked and I can feel/ my mother's life barreling towards me." --Jennifer Franklin author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018)
Ellen Devlin's Rita is as subversive as it is wise. Rita's sassy "talk backs" to heroines from the canon may be feminist retellings but Devlin's project is more complex. Each insightful warning, discussion, or interrogation (with female characters of carefully chosen seminal texts) explores necessary questions of identity, agency, free will, power, and complicity. These poems are instruments of power--asserting, imagining, describing what it's like to be a woman today. I wish I read this book when I was a young woman. This is no ordinary debut collection; Devlin's attention to craft is masterful and her language fresh and fierce. "The windows and doors are locked and I can feel/ my mother's life barreling towards me." --Jennifer Franklin author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018)