The past couple days I've been reading and enjoying two books by bloggers: The Keepsake Storm by Gina Franco and Becoming the Villainess by Jeannine Hall Gailey.

Villainess is an interesting mashup of conventional recastings of familiar myths and literary characters (Philomela, Persephone, Ophelia) and hyperkinetic fantasies of horror-movie final girls, tv characters, comic book impossibilities, the works. I worried at the start that Gailey might be scaring away readers who object to the literary quality of retellings on the one hand, and those who withdraw from popcultural references on the other; by the end of the book I decided I could care less about the hypothetical reader:

Female Comic Book Superheroes

are always fighting evil in a thong,
pulsing techno soundtrack in the background
as their tiny ankles thwack

against the bulk of male thugs.
They have names like Buffy, Elektra, or Storm
but excel in code decryption, Egyptology, and pyrotechnics...

Gailey mainly occupies the neutral space of fantasy, and entertainingly so, but when she goes personal it's a whole nother story:

I surrounded myself with the safe, with the sane.
"You know there's a history of mental illness in my family."
I devoted myself to botany, to mazes, to the infinitesimal.
I married you to challenge my inevitable end --
my human tranquilizer.
You like my "little poems" but
I scare you when I rock myself over and over
saying I dreamed I killed you again,
I dreamed you killed me again,
and you couldn't stop the nightmares.

(from "Her Nerves")

She blurs the fantasy/reality line to similarly great effect in a poem about her younger brother's obsession with throwing stars, and an Alice Fulton-esque dialogue between a creative writing teacher and the student who reluctantly retells the Philomela story as recovered memory.

*

Speaking of Fulton, she's blurbed Gina Franco's book, and her influence is clear there in poems such as "Where It Goes," a poem cast as a series of e-mails to the author from a sister or sister-in-law who's embarrassed to misspell bankrupsee and scetsafrinia but unafraid to look straight at charm, reality, disappointment and Hanging in There:

The printer was not printing (because it is
broken).
but I need to clean house so my hubby doesn't have
a cow in my livingroom. Be glad you don't have
one. never marry ok. Live ins are all
right but when you marry all that charm
and flattery fades away.
Where everything goes I have no clue.

The flatness and pathos of this piece aren't typical for Franco; more characteristic is an emphasis on physical details and a prosody that to my unschooled ears sounds a lot like Lowell's:

A woman hugging a rushing bush, brothers
perched on a truck, the old man who sells
melons all summer: where was he but among
the saved? So there are also numbers.
When the deluge arrived, I felt
eternity. I left my house. I took up
my cane and walked around in the dark, flicking
switches, banging into things, fighting, until I found
the door. I was up to my neck, swirling.

(from "Where the Bodies, Half-Dressed, in Pieces")

I especially like it when I can't really tell what's going on except for excited talking:

Do you
like my dress? Fire! Fire!
The babies! Two witnesses:

not a dress but a nightgown,
not babies but ants--the fire?
Yes, I see the fire taking

everything. Antartica?
So vast you can never
see the same place twice.

(from "Shift," part of the title sequence)

I notice that disaster and suffering play a part in each passage I've quoted. Those are indeed conditions in which most people feel alive, and though excitement and bewilderment come through in her work there is also the persistent sense that the poet is aware of mellower joys, and will get to them in time.

Fun. And not the kind I'm used to having reading recent poetry.