Customer Reviews

Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women's Voices (Crab Orchard)

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First, let me say that I discovered Julianna Baggott in Third Coast - a journal out of Michigan. I fell in love. I went on a search to learn more about my "new" favorite poet and discovered the lizzie borden book and immediately ordered it. I devoured it upon arrival and called my three best friends, (also poets) and suggested that they buy it, too. I read a couple of pieces over the phone to my poet friends and they orderd the book, too. The work is simply alive, though the majority of the women the poems are about are not. Norman Rockwell's wife, Helen Keller, Monica Lewinsky and of course Lizzie Borden are present among others. The poems are biographical fiction - Baggott paints tender, raw, angry, forlorn portraits. These poems are written so well that they ring true...it's easy to forget that they are poems and not pieces of autobiography. There is technique here, and patience with word choice and image. The closing piece, about Helen Keller, is worth the price of the book alone. I cannot recommend this book enough... I recommend it to everyone I talk to who's looking for a new poet (or not!).

Julianna Baggott writes outstanding fiction (for adults amd children) but she was first and still an outstanding poet. This one speaks from the voices of women from Lizzie Borden to Mary Todd Lincoln - and each poem is true to the speaker while touching the reader who may have nothing in common with the woman.