The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Rachel Zucker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 28, 2007 | Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series

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 cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Over the course of the five sections of Zucker's third collection, the poet examines wifedom as it functions in language, motherhood, religion and science (The first wife was a hard-working molecule). Zucker (The Last Clear Narrative) attempts to unpack the many meanings of the word wife: if the language would slip I could see what limber chance remains me. Always hovering is the husband—of whom the speaker says, here comes my husband again and / my mind, I'm describing; context—and the shadow of a real or imagined lover, who haunts the poems. Zucker's formally supple pieces range from shorter lyrics to discursive, meditative sequences; the book closes with a series of chatty, confessional poems titled Autographies, in which the poet continues to plumb personal experience, often in a disarmingly direct fashion: Shall we discuss married sex? By turns meditative, fearful, angry and loving, at their most scattershot these poems about marriage, fidelity, lust and motherhood can be disorienting for the reader, perhaps intentionally so. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"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 )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 130 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan; First edition. edition (December 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819568465
• ISBN-13: 978-0819568465
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 9.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,247,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenging and ambivalent, February 15, 2008

By 

Paul A. Baker "communicator" (Madison, Wis., US) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

Zucker's challenging and erudite work demands many readings. Motherhood, marriage, and writing are described in terms of astronomy, genetics, and organic chemistry. Zucker writes in aphorisms, proverbs, and oxymorons. A page of wispy short lines couplets faces a page of solid block run-on sentences. Like Marcel Duchamp, she's not afraid to crack a pane of glass, forcing the reader to squint through fragments and disjunctions and to adapt multiple points of view. One might hear echoes of Lyn Hejinian or Leslie Scalapino.

'The Bad Wife Handbook' is largely autobiographical. It's 'about' the conflicts and ambiguities within three roles--wife, mother, and writer--and about the pressures each places on the others:

"Truth is: / I want to ruin your life."