We Are Mary Shelley’s Monster by Danielle Byington

Danielle Byington’s We Are Mary Shelley’s Monster troubles the divide between the ordinary and the sublime. These poems teeter on the edges of beauty and of horror, wrestling with preternatural muses/demons such as the bronze coil of a dead cottonmouth, “dreaming bad dreams with me / about humanity’s white mouth,” and the haunting image of Sylvia Plath’s strappy high heel shoes. Painterly and literary, Byington’s poems offer “the past stitched to the present” in a remarkable tapestry. Her poems detail “our connection to the red line of history, / and other time-sensitive things like newspapers and flowers.” These poems warn that our breath is dangerous, a possible poison contributing to the deterioration of artifacts and knowledge. Even so, We Are Mary Shelley’s Monster sings with marvel and hope in the face of ongoing threats and decay just “as autumn / referees all things to rust.”

–Emily Rosko, Poetry Editor at Crazyhorse/swamp pink

 We Are Mary Shelley’s Monster is a book of brilliant ghosts, of headless snakes, of the moon falling from the sky, of Anna Nicole Smith’s beauty mark, Sharon Tate’s remarkable hair, and Sylvia Plath’s final pair of shoes. Readers encounter the water-bound spirit of Virginia Woolf and chase the troubled genius that haunts the legacy of Zelda Fitzgerald, where even the rain that falls in Asheville is “trying to tap her awake/…easing us all toward paradise.” As a multi-disciplinary artist and a comprehensive scholar of literature, Danielle Byington invites us into the serious collaboration that happens between viewers and texts and reminds us that the world is a text we are reading, from the insurrectionist absurdity of “masculine livestock on the Capitol stairs” all the way back to the light emanating from Plato’s cave. The range of reference and the depth of perception are dazzling in her unforgettable book. Byington creates poems that illuminate our interactions with art and culture, and that prompt us to consider how deeply our lives are made and remade by the works of art we engage.

–Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place

Danielle Byington’s We Are Mary Shelley’s Monster paints a portrait of Zelda Fitzgerald poured into air and of a snake’s white skull, of Anna Nicole Smith riding the bareback of methadone and of a rabid dog’s bottomless barks. With these startling poems, Byington gives us beautiful women who have bookended what men have barely started. This is a book full of moments that give us new names for both history and ourselves.

–Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Wanting Radiance and Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey