Jennifer Perrine
There are too many sources of inspiration to name them all, so I'll just address the "Invocation" poems, which felt like signposts or touchstones as I was writing the rest of the book.
The idea for those came from reading Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. I was struck by the way violence--especially what we'd now think of as gendered violence--kept showing up in the lives of female saints. I wanted to explore that, and I wanted to explore, too, the difference between the official record of their lives and what they might have said about their own experiences. I hope I imagined them with empathy, in a way that helps illuminate something about the lives of contemporary women and genderqueer people.
The idea for those came from reading Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. I was struck by the way violence--especially what we'd now think of as gendered violence--kept showing up in the lives of female saints. I wanted to explore that, and I wanted to explore, too, the difference between the official record of their lives and what they might have said about their own experiences. I hope I imagined them with empathy, in a way that helps illuminate something about the lives of contemporary women and genderqueer people.
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