Lupine
At the heart of all violence is fear: "Lupine" is a gathering of feminist prose poetry engaging themes of ecology, animality, and the human unknown. A series of interconnected dramatic monologues, the poems inhabit the personae of figures traditionally deemed Monstrous, giving them voice to confront and reclaim the violent mythologies that have so often been imposed upon them. As these unmuzzled monsters speak, the collection collapses the boundaries between the self and the subjugated other, ultimately upending the discourse of monstrosity itself. By exposing how women are villainized and sacrificed in response to cultural fear, "Lupine" offers a corrective to social narratives in which notions of the bestial and notions of the feminine are intimately entwined.
Bio
Jenny Irish is an assistant professor of English in creative writing at ASU, where she also received her MFA in 2016.
Praise for this book
A fang concealed inside a flower, 'Lupine' has a mythological sense of ecopoetics, one in which nature is often vindicated, in all its mossy, sinewy, animal luster, for the violence we as humans have enacted upon it. Jenny Irish has an unflinching eye, interrogating “spectacle and specimen,” wielding a mirror against cruel and patriarchal abuses of power.
Jenny Molberg Author of "Refusal"
'Lupine' is a rare feat of a chapbook, in which the poet Jenny Irish dawns the masks of so many monsters to tell us vividly how our culture fails women. From shadows, we make stories” our speaker reminds us, and Irish shows us how the object casting the shadow is often the haphazard negligence we regard each other with. This book is a bestiary of deep lyric knowing, from the first poem to the closing, immaculate question that makes 'Lupine’s' final line, what we’re given is a chorus of beasts we can’t help but think look like us.
C.T. Salazar Author of "Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking"
