Double Jinx: Poems

by Nancy Reddy

Selected for the National Poetry Series by Alex Lemon, Double Jinx follows the multiple transformations—both figurative and literal—that accompany adolescence and adulthood, particularly for young women. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Ovid’s Metamorphoses , the fairy tales in Anne Sexton’s Transformations , and the shifting dreamscapes of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s work, these poems track speakers as they make and remake themselves. A series of poems depict the character of Nancy Drew as she delves into an obsession with a doppelgänger. Cinderella wakes up to a pumpkin and a tattered dress after her prince grows tired of her. A young girl obsessed with fairy tales becomes fascinated with a copy of Gray’s Anatomy in which she finds a “pink girl pinned to the page as if in vivisection. Could she / be pink inside like that? No decent girl / would go around the world like that, uncooked.” The collection produces an understanding of the ways we construct ourselves, whether by way of imitation, performance, or transformation. And it looks forward as well, for in coming to understand our identities as essentially malleable, we are liberated. Or, as the author writes, “we’ll be our own gods now.”

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2015

About the author

Nancy Reddy is the author of The Good Mother Myth. Her previous books include the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx, a winner of the National Poetry Series. With Emily Pérez, she’s co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she teaches writing at Stockton University and writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful.

Reviews

[Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first section is exceptional. Love the intertextuality, the re-and mis-readings of fairy tales and Greek mythology. The rich network of allusions build towards a cultural idea of female/woman/girl that is made absurd, challenged, torn down, and interrogated. Beautifully crafted and conceived. The rest of the book didn't grab me as much, except for the one poem Inventing the Body that could have just as easily been part of the first section for its reaching outwards and storying.

[E.B. Schnepp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Double Jinx by Nancy Reddy is a book of profound transformations: girls are fairytale not-so-princesses, trees, portraits, and crows, among other things, sometimes simultaneously, all of whom “crave the clarity of disaster.” Princes are problematic, above having girls who refuse boundaries, such as in “Girl-Terrarium” where “no prince would have a girl half-tree.” Instead, Reddy draws her readers into a true love affair with language from pre-language and a woman from before the hypoid bone, “the ugly word for the floating bone that lets speech grow” to “rich-grammared language like Latin” that “needs armchairs and lullabies,” and the story of a Little Red who “gorged herself on words.” Borrowing on these familiar female figures Reddy draws us into this twisting dreamscape. She brings us, through this exploration of identity, to culminate in understanding of the ways in which we construct our identities, the ways in which identity is performed and imitated, how they can transform in any given situation. Everything is new, fresh, and still aching, girl-bodies are reminded of a time of “new skin itching like an open wound.” Even as she re-invents familiar stories she is “inventing the body,” watching as the remains of the earliest discovered hominid is shaped and re-shaped into something recognizable as woman.

But, the stories of girls re-imagined from the pages of fairytales and Nancy Drew Mysteries are far from all that Reddy has up her sleeve or in the rich pages of Double Jinx as she welcomes readers in to bold genealogies wherein her “father was a wolf,” and her “father’s father was a wood stove.” She sets her speakers and readers out “as pilgrims” who explore not only new literal wildernesses in search of a place to call home and find themselves, but also interior explorations of what it means to be a girl who was “born bad” and what happens when “the day we buried our sister our sweet Lord went under with her” to the point where those same pilgrims are forsaken literally as well as figuratively by the very Lord they sought.

Double Jinx is an endlessly fascinating and rich exploration of interiority, of femininity, and more broadly of identity itself that holds nothing back in the search for answers of what it means to be a whole self, creating an identity that is liberating in its fluidity and in the answering call that there isn’t only one way to be a princess, a girl, a body, or a self.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wildness and brutality to the transformations in Nancy Reddy's Double Jinx. The poetry focus almost exclusively on kinds of metamorphoses that undergo women--particularly young women. Reddy's eye for fairytale and surreal plays on seem familiar make these collection particularly strong. Religious references are profaned: Eve tells her side of the story, people feel sexual desire for the body of Christ, and both women and men are taken apart and put back together several times in several poems.

I read this quickly the first time, like a in a fugue state, and images of Frankenstein creatures and vivisections from Grey's Anatomy seemed central, Reddy's longish lines and often shocking juxtapositions pushing me through. I read it a second time through more slowly and allowed the richness of textural reference to make itself apparent. This rewards several readings.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reddy's poems are powerfully written, with imagery that sticks with me: clavicles, teeth, bones, and sharpness. And at the same time, one through line is a deconstruction and reconfiguring of the Nancy Drew titles that drew me in as a kid, which I found endlessly fascinating. Seeing those titles reworked into her storytelling was unconventional and unexpected and fun. Reddy's work explores and confronts concepts of femininity and agency head-on, and her sequences of poems are rich in their depth. One in particular, about a couple facing a fire approaching their home, is a particular favorite of mine. I want to keep reading more by her.

[Jessica Piazza · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of my top picks as a reader for the National Poetry Series. Reddy's playful use of language and pop-culture complement (as opposed to distracting from) the honesty and power of her writing. This book is KILLER. Everyone needs to read it immediately.

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://savvyverseandwit.com/2015/05/d...

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I kept thinking that any of these poems could be taught from a Norton anthology. Amazing, especially "Ex Machina."

[M]

I loved all of the references to myths and fairytales... and especially the Nancy Drew poems.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Reddy's book. It is smart, strange, and sonically pleasing; the poems fill your mouth with such richly textured sounds. I love its use of magic and Nancy Drew references, its wide-hearted spirit. It works so many deft magic tricks.