Books
WILD THINGS
Yes, we know how this story goes:
the bride who runs, the girl who roams,
how in his arms he’ll bring her home,
like Peter to his pumpkin shell,
like Jacob with his bride in veil,
like Hades to his ghastly hell,
and in his tower keep her well,
and sometimes let her story tell
his wild thing, he loves. –
“Where the Wild Things Were”
Medusa preparing for a date. Persephone at the Farmer’s Market. Dorothy contemplating a career in meteorology. What happens when the stories we think we know become the stories we need most to hear? Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose’s first chapbook, Wild Things is an eclectic mix of persona poems and poems that meditate on the mythologies of femininity. With her characteristic wit, Johnston Ambrose offers an incisive poetic analysis of beloved fairy tales and classic myths, asking readers to re-see and re-think familiar stories of womanhood.
Reviews:
"Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose is a poet to be reckoned with. I’m wild, wild, wild about her poetry. And Wild Things is the best book of poetry I’ve read in the past year. I kid you not. The VERY best.
There’s nothing like a poet genius with a feminist bent to take on so many of the myths we were taught–really, force fed–through the years of schooling from grade school to grad school." --Karla Linn Merrifield on GoodReads
For purchase at https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/.../wild-things.../
Reviews:
IMAGO, DEI
“She was always a disappointment.” So begins Imago, Dei, Rattle Magazine’s 2021 Chapbook Prize winner, a novella-in-verse about a woman navigating her way to wholeness after having grown up under the fragmenting shadow of evangelicalism and toxic masculinity.
GoodRead Reviews (4.29/5 stars):
"Imago, Dei is an emotionally powerful collection of poems highlighting the damage inflicted on girls raised in a severely conservative Evangelical household....the most impactful book of poetry I've read in a very long time" --GoodReads
"This is a great collection of poems. Both personal and universal, about women in America, religious women in America." --Goodreads
"Imago, Dei is an artful, imagistic, painful chapbook that prevails through metamorphosis. It is beautifully written, deep, with both searing dark and light. It's serious but not without humor. The experience of a difficult life, human and otherwise that can't help but rise in beauty. It has stayed with me."-- Goodreads
Purchase for $6 here: https://www.rattle.com/product/imago-dei/
Divination Ritual
What do girls see when they gaze into their mirrors? Elizabeth's work-in-progress is a full-length poetry collection that meditates on the ways in which girls and young women try to divine themselves into what they have been trained to believe is ideal femininity. The poems in this collection explore intersections between female identity and girlhood divination games like M.A.S.H, Bloody Mary, Magic 8 Balls, and Ouija Boards. Divided into sections themed around six different types of divination, for example using mirrors (catoptromancy), water (hydromancy), and fire (pyromancy), the book asks how girls can claim selves untethered by religion, toxic masculinity, and beauty culture.
How to Be
a Redhead
(Chapbook in progress)
This collection takes as its focus the redhead as a cultural phenomenon, and, in particular, the redheaded girl/woman as a site of longing, fear, and fantasy.
Why does Edward Munch imagine Sin as a redhaired woman? Why is the sexually promiscuous woman Gulliver encounters on the island of the Hounhyms a redhead? How was Queen Elizabeth I's power (or imagined monstrosity) connected to the color of her hair (the Scots referred to her as “the red hag”)? What lies behind the Pre-Raphaelite impulse to imagine both the Virgin Mary and the prostitute Mary Magdalene as redheads? What about the series of pre-Raphaelite paintings which depict both Medusa (killed by Perseus) and Andromeda (married to Perseus after he saves her using Medusa's head) as redheads? One dominant theme becomes clear: the redhead is a figure that both titillates and terrifies, an iconic repository for all-too familiar anxieties about female power.