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7:03 AM Posted by James Owens

A review of Jeannine Hall Gailey's Becoming the Villainess at The Pedestal Magazine

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Becoming the Villainess remembers a truth that some books tend to forget: poetry can be fun without sacrificing serious intent or importance. Gailey’s poems about pop culture characters such as Wonder Woman, Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer seem imbued with their creator’s honest joy in the dramatic gestures and campy minutiae of comic books’ resolutely un-politically-correct vision of the world, and her readers get to share in that joy. Other poems look closely, and overall more soberly, at folktales and Greek myth. The casual bookstore browser might not expect to find this range of topics brought together, but this book is less interested in distinctions between high and low culture than in continuities that render the distinctions irrelevant. Gailey reminds us that both the heroines of classical myth and modern comic book or video game icons originate in the need, often subversive, to find female archetypes of power....

1 comments:

sam of the ten thousand things said...

Good review James. Gailey is an interesting writer.