Everything Is Real: Poems

For readers of Jeannine Hall Gailey, Emily Corwin, Sasha West, and Rebecca Lindenberg, Rita Fenstein offers a collection of high fantasy, horror chic poetry that mesmerizes with incantations conjuring a lover. Rita Feinstein's high-concept collection of tropey, bent, alternative fairy-tale poems interconnect to uncover the lore of a dark romantic relationship that exists in this world and others, using hybridized formal constraints to make portals and gates. This is careless, dangerous poetry spoken by a cunning heroine who wants us to believe that "all creation starts with love. And/or violence" and to conflate the two until "my name is throbbing in his throat." Slayers are pitted against lovers, and sex is a spell that creates as often as it destroys. "Once upon a time, all women were foxes and all men were hunters," Feinstein spins. "The older the fox, the longer she had evaded capture, the more tails she grew. Our nine-tailed heroine made running look easy. No man had touched her, and precious few had seen her." These are poems full of songs and delicious screams.