Alexandra Teague is the author of two previous books of poetry-Mortal Geography, winner of Persea's 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders-and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A former Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Alexandra is a professor at University of Idaho.

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.