Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.
Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.
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Overview
Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819576118 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2015 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 130 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
RACHEL ZUCKER is the author of The Last Clear Narrative (2004) and Eating in the Underworld (2003), and winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize and the Center for Book Arts Award.
Rachel Zucker is the author of The Last Clear Narrative, The Bad Wife Handbook and Eating in the Underworld. She is the winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, the Center for Book Arts Award and the Salt Hill Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in many well-known journals including: 3rd Bed, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Epoch, Fence, Iowa Review, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner as well as in the Best American Poetry 2001 anthology.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Monogamist
A human being can't compare size and brightness
on two occasions. So we say
the moon has a dark side.
We say the tide twice a day.
I say that man there, so unlike
my husband.
The Museum of Accidents
The school girl's tights speckle in the rain. In the city
the sparrow on sparrow feet skips across my path, legs invisible.
We are bound. Similar,
indistinct forms called bodies,
our Milky Way's spiral arms —
stars, nebulae, matter —
bound to great disaster.
Codary
Once he was a type, kind, tide,
but became a singularity.
I stopped breathing.
Where the husband's orbit overlaps: darkness.
No light can be shed on what lies beyond this
gravitational sheer,
harsh polarity
of wanting.
The Secret Room
Isn't hidden. Nor filled with goods or bodies. This feeling —
[strip the wallpaper,
knock for panels]
I can't explain it — is always,
I think his gaze made it. I say
what I don't intend so as to say something of
this tending, tendency, tender unsayable place I mean to take him.
Firmament
Below his clean shadow:
a sunlit prairie. A wheat field
from the air: plush and temperate.
The breeze is a brave caress. There is something I see in him: tip, edge, hint
— the skin of it. Shifting wheat
over soil over cavern over water over igneous over molten.
Monogamist
Riding a bike down a flight of steps misnames them,
reveals their lusty gravity.
Have you heard that Brontosaurus is a Camarasaurus head on
an Apatosaurus body? — my love's like that: shaped,
named beast did, did not exist.
They should be called falls, this plummet.
Galaxies Rushing Away
I'm trying not to try to get him into bed. Instead I try
but the husband flinches when I and flinches when I say
I love you and I do love you but say
I'm meeting a woman named Kate.
Then, off to the winebar, order
sancerre, nice summery white at $7/glass;
he, me, and vast millions are fast,
— red shift getting redder, every galaxy from every galaxy, vow, promise, primordial
atom — rushing faster, all on our way to greater disorder.
Axon, Dendrite, Rain
When he speaks I am allowed to look at him.
Let this perfect conjure slide over (all over)
the thought reaching out to my loud now —
I want to —
but find no way to make my hands natural, accidental. I try to make his skin a chaste idea. But even his gloves, made from slaughtered goats, their pliable kid leather become a bias-cut slip, myelin sheath, the impulse jumps
node-to-node, too fast for capture.
The body.
Less, less real. I am aware of wanting to look at him. In the long space in which others speak I cannot look at him.
take your clothes off
And I do. In dream after dream, except last night when I'm running a long way in the rain and, basketball in one hand, he stands watching. And when he watches —
I run and run, do not wake up but that — (there,) that, that, that: rain at my window, husband in my bed.
Rhyme, Lascivious Matchmaker
Each time I try to —
here comes my husband again and
my mind, I'm describing; context.
Forgive me, anemone, my green clearing.
He is no still pool, but actual.
If I showed him my skull below the skin then threw out the skin, would he wipe clean
the bone? A thin gold wire prevents my jaw from metaphor or ...
His v-neck suggests —
The bruised way he sits —
What to do with his lips —
Hermeneutic
The sea is supposed to be something more than a saline menagerie.
I thought to be full of feeling rather than with child was
mutable, could stay small, but now I'm desolate, fleeting, pierced with this blunt
fissure. My babies left a narrow passage where longing festers. And here he entered.
Brutal shunt, my heart fills with sea water. Involuntary muscles
seize, shudder, refuse to scar.
The Tell
The basketball makes him not my husband and saying so in poems makes me
the bad wife. Where is the private, i.e., impassive mask I purchased for my wedding
but then forgot to wear?
My mind wrote me a letter requesting to be left out of it. My body sent flowers
and a note: "sorry for your loss."
But both paid to see the flop and stayed in 'til the river.
Better to fold the winning hand than fall in love
with your cards, says the husband.
Where I Went Instead of Paris
In the city, out windows, I fit his face onto the faces of other men and boys
and look away before it fades.
I have learned to fly by running fast,
though the waking body won't comply.
His face is the face of all men
not my husband; I see him everywhere.
In the next dream I shave my head and find my skull misshapen. In the next dream
I am raped in the elevator. The doorman steps over my body. He has your face.
Wife, Wife, Duck
I'm not sure what this could be called "doubt"
but that's too simple these clouds: grayer than white
(the white sky behind) like the sky at evening.
To wish the best for someone
I love might mean leaving or leaving him alone. To wish for
him. Wish for him to —
It looks like rain means it's not raining.
It Took 24 Hours to Make the Moon
I forgot to think of him today.
Made of carbon, oxygen, calcium: you, him, I, stars.
When a Mars-like body and Earth collided within hours was a protoplanet named Moon
and a planet moved away.
For days
I forget.
Mantle, core, ocean, air, I am made of our
— air, air, air and air —
carved-out crater of impact.
Alluvial
They say God's voice in the city sounds like a man but in the desert
sounds like a woman. His voice, the spine of nighttime, sounds like water.
Rock grazed by streamlets long enough will sunder. One word against my sternum and
I unzip.
Monogamist
I've fallen ________ with him, stupid cliché, with his dark blue
officewear. Maybe
I just love my little boy too much — he looks like him — itself a grievous treason.
Just ask my older son. Ask the husband. Ask anyone. Ask
the language for one decent synonym and watch it stutter: perseveration,
obsession, attention to detail aren't love exactly nor is
chastity enough punishment.
My Beautiful Wickedness
Someone dropped a house on me and stole my blood shoes.
The girl with her skipping and singing comes to kill me. What then will become
of my spells, sole treasure I possess?
What I see when what I see is not there — I know he feels it.
Looking at him like this
isn't a spell to make him love anyone
but might. All the good wife wants is to go home.
When no one watches I teach the dog to fly.
Floating Wick in Petrol
I am too happy to see him.
Someone must be blamed. Perhaps the therapist or my marrying young.
Say, are you really this beautiful?
I dream a woman puts a gun in my mouth to make me choose — lustrous, sleek, sexed.
Next a jade green sandal from a bottom drawer. Suede wedge with straps
that wind around my shin. My foot in the smooth cradle is lavish, ignitable.
Please, say you are a dress I can put on for tonight,
say you are a gun or untouched leather
purse, a beaded belt or denim patch or felt-bottomed box or basted hem, say
you are a spiral binding or photo of a forest framed in beeswax, say a hat pin, say a buckle
say a gun or polished knob, say anything
Bridle
I promised to stay steady,
but who knew the rage
of arbors?
Forests, groves, flagpoles,
Stand, we told them. Stay.
When we set up the blocking,
marked my toe-stops with tape,
I can't describe it —
how my shoes abrade,
fit, like casket.
Thought, Antithoughts
I've nothing to hold him,
suspect I've been dreaming —
a woman awake, her husband breathing — she wants
to be anywhere.
He's a man who happened to notice
I made him want to play guitar
but he didn't. This is the winter the husband started snoring
and science said free will is a feeling we believe in.
Post hoc confabulation.
I must get up and attend the microorganisms.
Sex
Wane, wax, wobble.
My mind is a map of hunger.
They say Abulafia could stop his heart with one letter. Alef
lodged in his semi-lunar valve.
Small e after breath is what I do to keep living.
What Is Not Science Is Art Is Nature
I am dreaming a hole right into the voice of God.
Straight into the dark place where my children were made
but can't follow me back to. Right into the room whose windows are too high up to see out,
though the sloped roof is too low for me to stand up.
In New York snow is unusual, arrives like childhood memories that might not have happened, disappears
without changing anything. But do we say,
when it snows, because some countries
don't believe in snow, I dreamed
of snow? No, we say the news was right or wrong.
We say this strong desire for a window — huge square glass through which a child standing up in a crib
at night alone in a room at the bottom of a flight of stairs far from the mother in winter sees:
a Greenwich Village garden cast in urban glow,
quiet, because snow in the '70s was enough to make the city slow and mute — is real.
So, say it really happened. That doesn't mean
it will again or did. Or that the dream doesn't make you ordinary.
Freud Had Sex but Jung Had God
I take water into my lungs
in lieu of him, want for air,
have none and not
because a good wife rose up in me or a sharp right turn, bright
discipline befell me: I wanted sugar and salt in equal measure
one making the other desperate the now tasteless by turns desperate
this was this wanting of course it was the kind of snow that never
sticks — O blizzard! wild sky at wit's end —
but when I look again the street is barely stained
(sugar, flurry, salt, drift)
and the flat, clean air swears snow never fell here.
Squirrel in a Palm Tree
{
up, out of the sentry box over the parapet, bastion, rampart, breastwork
[don't think "I have left them ..."]
draw and look, lift — erase, draw and lift and lift and lift
an erasable slate the velum top sheet takes away
["left them"]
{
up, over the country
the edge of coast and further out the clouds like stones in deep waters a river delving the lush green marsh an amorphous rum babba, soaked and spongy grasses and cattails misstate the surface
the cabin has the sharp inhale of opening a gift
Ø
high ceiling (blue) and pink and gray striped walls shape me
make a naked Alice in the bath
big and tiny here and far away
a wonder the body fits so mythic is the mother-absentia
tundra of abandon
I suffer the gift, silence,
for once, nothing happening
none using my name to mean anything
Ø
bed as wide as it is long the night inhuman calm the outlets and picture frames and decorative plates are safe the bathtub and mirror and doors and linens I am as light as negligee have not my army's entourage
Ø
on Sunday I will step back into the living room littered with toys the two boys happy/shy/mad to see me but like I dawdled in the shower
like I never was anywhere but ready to answer
where is my?
can't find the ...
look here, the light through the sycamores and dense magnolias live oaks tasked with spanish moss
a veranda you reach through a twelve-foot window
be real
Ø
unnaturally light like a various gravity exhibit at a science museum my mother has a necklace made of severed reeds that seem to weigh less than air
they look like bird teeth or shell splinters
— Haiti? Australia? Peru?
she can't remember where she got it
but the stones — emerald rough from Sri Lanka on the bookshelf near the kitchen; square, flat rock from Arizona on the mantle in the bedroom — those she knows by heart
a life of picking things up and bringing them elsewhere
Ø
here is the tree of my thirtieth birthday:
a palm between two sycamores
the pineapple-totem trunk is a woven present fronds rustling to offset loneliness squirrel feasts on hope
Ø
alone, the room gets smaller despite there being fewer people the TV approaches like a hopeful lover
let us, I say to myself, consider the children objectively, which is impossible:
the boys who are babies create a slavish planet. this means I am bending and lifting and every each moment listening for disaster which is silence where his "dadaka" and "teka-tekah" pause is surely climbing or choking or considering mischief
on guard, keeper! be lively!
anything which requires concentration is danger —
so drag myself to watchfulness with a stab of catastrophic thinking so tired, delighted I've half a mind to leave them and no mind left to do it and nothing to spare of this utter love
mother in a foreign make this real
Ø
some day they will leave you
and you will visit the kingdom of adult concerns and never leave
and will want to and will dream of night wakings and tiny spoons of temperate cereal on hands and knees for spilled cumin seeds you will remember the every night of tiny things back in boxes and on shelves and under and in and the ache ache ache of your back as he learns to walk or the relief of finally squatting in a parking lot to nurse him stop that wail
a woman with young children is not a woman but a mammal, salve, croon, water carrier
she has a prize they all desire
lift, lift, life
Ø
if there are nests discarded on the sidewalk I step around them knowing what it costs to weave one
once my shadow was the shape of a bear or egg with arms and legs now slim and bony the boys sucked the melon-sweet milk right out of
a letting, flesh mongers
and if the nest, a relic, outlasts the wind, rain, marauders,
it is always the cupped halo of ambivalence
desire won over by desire is not the same as satisfaction nor lust nor yet resolve I don't believe in happiness
Ø
I am equally and at once estranged from the person I knew as I and from the mossy being made so carefully
the child becomes a wedge between actions and self like a cyclone of gauze wraps himself around my mothering and makes a hollow form
shape: human
cocoon around a maelstrom
Ø
in New York the apartment's windows face south and my son knows little of the sunset only that at night it's on the other side of the world
sleep with me, he says I like the other sheets, he says lime in my sippy cup?
anything to keep me
object of desires, I never satisfy because my body is impractical,
boundaried, impermanent
here, on the balcony, dusk draws the bundled leaves on winter trees like hanging planters or Christmas ornaments
twenty minutes later the leaves are hedgehogs,
the branches: flaws and fractures in the skin of twilight
now on the other side of the world, the sun's fiery descent means little when witnessed less when missed
perception or staying is a mighty effort
Ø
if the language would slip I could see what limber chance remains me but is always my chaperone
the moon is so full it must recline the hip is the location the child claims and aches
from use, from absence, the whole pelvis an isosceles arrowhead barely a ledge the arm comes to scaffold him, the elbow buffer from gaudy onlookers the breast becomes the shy boy's brow-rest — does he remember the Cyclops wonders?
I remember his greedy squeezing kneading tiny nail edge my love a tinderbox inflamed, viral
obese, inhale
I miss ...
when the child falls forward and catches himself with his hands, stands carefully, bunches his face: fine, fine, I get to hold him now and kiss his palms and put my nose against his cheek
Ø
when away from my tree I want to brag the treasure
smooth green globe before the husk mars innocence
monumental nut where can I bury such bounty?
the sugar-milk is too much at once and must be dealt with but there is no dividing beauty, no rationing
I must escape my reputation for hoarding — so in love with the heft of the Asian pear,
the lusty hue of the persimmon, I keep and keep until they spoil
— Crack it!
these edibles, not memories,
the fontanel bones of his skull about to close
Ø
some women cherish the fathomless want of infants
as it is all around me I cannot muster judgment and having been stayed from my sentence these three days by a stutter of double dashes -- I --
am still, I
on either side of the long spine lie two shallow ditches walk your finger tips along these furrows but never pressure the raised column holy like the horizon it is the going and the getting and the lifting and the carrying the bending and listening kneeling and squatting it is my fingers' careful sweeping the alphabet floor mat at four am for the rubber binky it is the way my body in his twin bed tricks him to sleep the way I tucked his baby face against my belly and stood and stooped and swung like a mechanical gadget and set him down and made the back stay hunched so the hand could stroke his hair and sleep him and stayed when the back protested and when the mind tried to make sense the body stopped it
my love is the bent body, the mastered spine
{
the coast is a sure painter's mark but the horizon is nothing human
from this height the flat expanse of farms and plots and houses, speckled towns like the oyster, lime, and sand sidewalk they call "tabby"
then like flecks of polished shell the tilted glance makes the settled patches rise like lily pads on tree-green ponds, the roads lascivious zippers
and the sun through the horizon crawl-space may be the moon for it is everywhere a glowing ring and cannot be a star rather some bulb just this width greater than the earth's diameter
whether my body is in conflict with the plane's intention is irrelevant
my children at this remove are figures, figments
the difference between here and there
{
planes always wanted to lighthouse, cliffside, pride they carry but do not mother
{
20 miles from LaGuardia the houses are little studs punched into denim, no longer in fashion
the tugs make snags in the nylon surface of the ocean, the houses and trucks along the capillaries, when,
oh my —
the fortress edges of Battery Park, airshaft depressions of empty lots and unbought air rights and
the Empire State buildingamazing with her glinting, ramrod posture, suddenly
alone above her waist-high charges
Excerpted from "The Bad Wife Handbook"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Rachel Zucker.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Monogamist
The Museum of Accidents
Codary
The Secret Room
Firmament
Monogamist
Galaxies Rushing Away
Axon, Dendrite, Rain
Rhyme, Lascivious Matchmaker
Hermeneutic
The Tell
Where I Went Instead of Paris
Wife, Wife, Duck
It Took 24 Hours to Make the Moon
Alluvial
Monogamist
My Beautiful Wickedness
Floating Wick in Petrol
Bridle
Thought, Antithoughts
Sex
What is Not Science is Art is Nature
Freud Had Sex But Jung Had God
Squirrel in a Palm Tree
Annunciation
The Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma
Autographies
Acknowledgments & Notes
What People are Saying About This
"I love this book's fearless engagement with the impossibility of marriage; gorgeously Zucker combines prosaic thoroughness with stopped-time incandescence. If The Bad Wife Handbook is the manifesto for a new movement, sign me up!"
— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films: New Poems
"I love this book's fearless engagement with the impossibility of marriage; gorgeously Zucker combines prosaic thoroughness with stopped-time incandescence. If The Bad Wife Handbook is the manifesto for a new movement, sign me up!"—Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films: New Poems
"I love this book's fearless engagement with the impossibility of marriage; gorgeously Zucker combines prosaic thoroughness with stopped-time incandescence. If The Bad Wife Handbook is the manifesto for a new movement, sign me up!"—Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films: New Poems
"Zucker has the confessionalist's knack for turning personal and difficult into universal and transcendent, and the experimentalist's gift for fearless, associative play. The combination is unsettling and ground-breaking: a vitally necessary book for our age."—Arielle Greenberg, author of My Kafka Century
“Zucker has the confessionalist's knack for turning personal and difficult into universal and transcendent, and the experimentalist's gift for fearless, associative play. The combination is unsettling and ground-breaking: a vitally necessary book for our age.”