Refusal: Poems

by Jenny Molberg

In Refusal, her searing new collection of poetry, Jenny Molberg draws on elements of the uncanny--invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons & Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide--to investigate trauma, addiction, and forces of oppression. Exposing the effects of widespread toxic misogyny, this confrontational volume examines societal, cultural, and personal gaslighting in situations of domestic abuse. As Molberg writes in "Loving Ophelia Is," "love and hate simultaneously is the trick of abuse / and the trick of abuse is a vexation of the mind." A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, while another series on a mother's struggle with addiction captures the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs heavily on a woman's position in the world.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2020

Reviews

[Layla Lenhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most heart wrenching and excellent collections I’ve read. Jenny knows exactly how to tap into my chest with this one.

[Melissa Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't admire this book more--the poems that are letters to friends (this book understands that friendship is as powerful a form of love as any), the poems about abuse that I wish my younger self could have read. This is fierce, beautiful work.

[Sidney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jenny Molberg’s latest book is a cathedral of heartbreak and wonder. There’s so much hardscrabble mettle here in the face of loss and shame, so much wisdom, each poem becomes a glorious mosaic of her persona’s reassembled self. Refusal is a rejection of rejection and annihilation; it’s a two-fisted, full-throated, spitting demand instead for renewal, and man the evolution of her self-made salvation is a sacred thing to witness.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this on a whim because i wanted to read more poetry and i loved 'marvels of the invisible' by this author. this one is structured as a series of letter-poems, and i found the format + the lack of a central theme missing the mark for me.

[Kate Gaskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jenny Molberg's Refusal is many things: a love song, an elegy, a cautionary tale, and a brilliant indictment of toxic male narcissism. Through richly imaginative poems executed with knife-sharp craft, she re-centers the female narratives of literary figures like Ophelia and Penelope, restoring agency and personhood to women who have been stripped of both. Molberg engages both high and low culture in a thrillingly effective way with poems that range from speculative to fantasy to horror. Though these poems are searing, they are also tender. A series of poems in the middle of the book engages with the speaker's mother's addiction issues in a way that is so deft and compassionate it resonates as a touchstone for the whole book. Rich with gorgeous images and Molberg's ear for musicality, Refusal is deeply affecting and extraordinarily memorable. I cannot recommend it enough.

[K.K. Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy. Wow.

"I am not proud of my anger / but a lie can turn the body inside out."

"Something I don't understand about myself / makes people want to hurt me."

"I couldn't tell you what made me feel loved, / or whether anyone asked."

"I'd welcome anyone's / hands around my neck"

"A stable of monsters, I say / knowing there is only me."

"Do not go to your mind / for a solution. The mind / is what tell us / little fucked-up stories / and then we reach again / for the wine."

"In his one mind, / the prince of demons wants so badly to be good, / or at least liked, but a softie monster never got anywhere, / as his father the king used to say."

"I have found nothing In the shape of nothing One can prove only what exists / As in shadows or holes What is immaterial As in Forgiveness Which I cannot find"

"How am I this small? / How have I stayed with you this long"

"I was walking on atmosphere, forgetting / all my fundamentals, that gravity / forces form and shape, that orbits / must evolve, that if two bodies / are attracted to each other, one of them must fall."

"The lives we have chosen not to live / are enough to fill the whole day's trains / with ghosts and ghosts and ghosts."

[Shuly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is stunning. I'm a fan of great last lines, and this poet does not disappoint. Her poetry traverses the intimacies of relationships gone wrong, gone awry, and her poems both accuse and confess. The language is lyrical, and the poems surprise in the exact right ways. I have read several of these over and over, and I know it's a collection I will return to again.

[Michelle Hannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are skillfully crafted, powerful, brave, and deeply poignant. They are about pain and trauma, survival and resilience. It’s a marvel to me how a page or less of words can make one feel so acutely. What a unique art form poetry is, and what a master Jenny is.

[Emma Goldman-Sherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will stay with me forever. Molberg is writing female experience and trauma and the weight of so much rapist culture on top of us all, and it's articulated in such fine and memorable detail. This is a beautifully moving collection.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Something I don't understand about myself
makes people want to hurt me."