Wedding Underwear For Mermaids

Linda Ann Strang’s first poetry collection skilfully entwines fairy tales, womanhood, African culture, and the female psyche. The warrior mother, the spurned lover, the maltreated bride: they are all here, expertly drawn in lush, original language that you’ll want to wallow in from beginning to end.Unflinching and intuitive, Strang’s forty-two poems paint an image of womanhood and femininity that ...

File Size: 120 KB
Print Length: 47 pages
Publisher: Honest Publishing (March 8, 2011)
Publication Date: March 8, 2011
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B004R9Q79S
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“I read this book straight through. I was immediately drawn in by the lush imagery and the narrative construction of each poem. While each poem tells a unique story, so does the book as a whole. The title poem is probably my favorite one. If you like ...”

s at once insightful, witty, dark, intimate, and utterly human.“If poets would have us fall for them, this is a poet to fall for. But be careful where you go. In Linda Ann Strang’s first collection of poems, Wedding Underwear for Mermaids, one sets out from the unsettling banks of its title, a purposefully slippery trope that will have you wrapping your mind around an image as elusive as the legendary undine herself.And you are right where the poet wants you: in the elemental waters of the subconscious while grounded in familiar earthly and cultural spheres, a feat few poets manage as convincingly as Ms. Strang does. We are in for a ride–the siren’s ride, to be precise. After all, the title beckons us toward new shores, so to new shores (read: crossing the liminal of the subliminal) the reader must be willing to go. “Indeed, the female psyche that holds the ‘happily ever after’ like a treasure box reveals an inner world alive with fairy tales and pagan myth, one you don’t want to betray and that keeps you alert to what is important to it. The fairy tale moral is beauty; there’s no Christian or man-made moral.The puzzle fits, so it’s beautiful. That’s how Ms. Strang’s poems unfold. Cinematic in quality, if not in form, her poems jump-cut from scene to scene, with cultural allusions layering elliptical narrative arcs through multicultural distances and multi-ethnic relations, sometimes at warp speed. High-voltage sensuality is delivered via visual collage in an everyday performance not only where Africa and the West meet, but also where colors and textures rich and sensuous translate into a cohesive choice of words, born out of the poet’s command of the senses.Smart and incisive, Strang knows the right moves, ringing the changes on key places of her poetic inner- and outer-scapes–namely, African culture and ethnicity, sexual beauty and intimacy, legends and nostalgia, transformation and the body. She falls, and we fall with her, into language crackling, nervy, and bold with the right attitude at the right time—poems as crafted, contemporary journeys propelled by wit and tillered by the archetypal feminine.”Alan Botsford, editor of Poetry Kanto and author of Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore