Or What We’ll Call Desire
Alexandra Teague

This heartrending and darkly playful new collection by Alexandra Teague tries to understand the edges of self in a patriarchal culture and in relation to a family history of mental illness and loss. In poems that mix high art and popular culture (from classical Greek statues to giant plaster artichokes, Cubism to Freudian Disney dolls), Teague interweaves self-reflection with the stories and lives of mythic and historic female figures, such as the dangerous-wise witch Baba Yaga and early-20th-century sculptors’ model Audrey Munson—calling across time and place to explore desire, grief, and the representation and misrepresentation of the female form. 

“This is an urgent and exacting book about the grace, and the cost, of survival.”
—Molly McCully Brown

“A book of wonders and a book of wondering, this is Alexandra Teague’s most ambitious, accomplished, and intimate book yet.”
—Mary Szybist

Alexandra Teague is the author of two previous books of poetry—Mortal Geography, winner of the 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders—and a novel, The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. She is a professor at the University of Idaho. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-499-7 / 66 pages / Poetry