Watch How We Walk: A Novel

LoveGrove, Jennifer

Literature & Fiction

ReadHowYouWant

Skulls and crossbones: poetic piracy. Burning barns, drunken Christmases, scars, hospitals, serial killers, and, eventually, the possibilities of self-preservation and hope. The Dagger Between Her Teeth is Jennifer LoveGrove's bloodthirsty debut. Powerfully topical, it's a rare collection of poetry -- one that confronts notions of violence, both physical and emotional, by focusing on a woman's strength of will and capacity for ferocity. In The Dagger Between Her Teeth, LoveGrove resurrects and reinvents the dramatic young lives of two eighteenth-century corsairs, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Alive with the golden age of piracy but infused with the pulse of now, these poems shed more blood than a Tarantino flick. LoveGrove's work provokes with theatrical plundering, creative cross-dressing, and vicious vengeance: “Disdain reddens my blood ― I / know well I killed / my own husband and took / his clothes to be out here.” Still other poems examine the conflicting mythologies of Lilith, Adam”s first wife, who was evicted from Eden for her sexual aggression. Disputed and co-opted, Lilith has been blamed for a vast array of “deviance,” as well as for miscarriages, wet dreams, nightmares in children, and lustful women ― these poems explore the more ominous elements of her mythology. But there is also a part of The Dagger Between Her Teeth that is informed by more personal experience, from disrupted family dynamics to the failure of romance: “You’re not as fragile as you think you are; / I know you didn’t snap / any of those feathered necks / yourself. It’s all just tapeloops / and backward masking, take-out / wings and old Talking Heads albums.”

The Dagger Between Her Teeth

Poetry

a misFit book

When Emily was a little girl, all she wanted to be when she grew up was a Full-Time Pioneer; in her Jehovah’s Witness family, the only imaginable future is a life of knocking on doors and handing out Watchtower magazines. But Emily starts to challenge her upbringing. She becomes closer to her closeted uncle, Tyler, as her older sister, Lenora, hangs out with boys, wears makeup, and gets a startling new haircut. After Lenora disappears, everything changes for Emily, and as she deals with her mental devastation she is forced to consider a different future. Alternating between Emily’s life as a child and her adult life in the city, Watch How We Walk offers a haunting, cutting exploration of disfellowshipping,” proselytization, and cultural abstinence, as well as the Jehovah’s Witness attitude towards the worldlings” outside of their faith. Sparse, vivid, suspenseful, and darkly humorous, Jennifer LoveGrove’s debut novel is an emotional and visceral look inside an isolationist religion through the eyes of the unforgettable Emily.

Contemporary

ECW Press

The Tinder Sonnets

Book*hug Press

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Books by LoveGrove, Jennifer