Branding Girls by Laura Madeline Wiseman

$14.00

“Brand: as in a mark. Branded: as in burned on an animal, a criminal, someone enslaved. Branding: as in a trademarking, a commodification. In Laura Madeline Wiseman’s terrifying Branding Girls , the poet demonstrates that our femininity is defined by advertising, name brands, and material desires. From the figure of the Japanese “elevator girls,” we learn that contemporary women are in danger of becoming a series of negations: ‘Not geisha. Not madams… / Not call girls / or masseuses. Not school girls / in pleated skirts.’ I love this collection for the same reasons I love TV’s “Mad Men”: its elegance, its dark humor, and its pain.”

– Jehanne Dubrow, author of Stateside and From the Fever-World
Table of Contents

Rating: *****  [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s brave new book, Branding Girls, offers us a mercurial and unflinching exploration of the commodification of the body, reduced to a vessel of projections, to a commercial brand, naturally, but also wearing the brand, the wound of the animal possessed. And with possession comes the animation, the childlike doll-play, the habitation by foreign spirits. Part of the power and pathos of these investigations lies in their restraint and tonal complexity, the asbestos of their wit, the intelligence of detail that illuminates even as it mystifies the closeness with which objectification haunts the desiring imagination. A rare thing. This book will widen the gaze that reads it.

– Bruce Bond, author of Radiography and Peal

Rating :*****  [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Branding Girls amuses, alarms, and ultimately affirms in its eloquent confrontation of female stereotypes.”

– Weave Magazine

http://www.weavemagazine.net/2012/04/chapbook-roundup-we-
ndel-mennies-wiseman.html

Rating: *****  [5 of 5 Stars!]

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Description

Branding Girls

by Laura Madeline Wiseman

$14, paper

Laura Madeline Wiseman has a doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she teaches English. She is the author of several chapbooks including, Branding Girls (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and She who Loves Her Father (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her poetry has appeared in Margie, Feminist Studies, Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Pebble Lake Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared in Arts & Letters, Spittoon, Blackbird, American Short Fiction, 13th Moon, and elsewhere. Her reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso Poetry Review, 42Opus, and elsewhere.

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