Synopsis

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.

Publishers Weekly

Over the course of the five sections of Zucker's third collection, the poet examines wifedom as it functions in language, motherhood, religion and science ("The first wife was a hard-working molecule"). Zucker (The Last Clear Narrative) attempts to unpack the many meanings of the word "wife": "if the language would slip I could see what limber chance remains me." Always hovering is the "husband"-of whom the speaker says, "here comes my husband again and / my mind, I'm describing; context"-and the shadow of a real or imagined lover, who haunts the poems. Zucker's formally supple pieces range from shorter lyrics to discursive, meditative sequences; the book closes with a series of chatty, confessional poems titled "Autographies," in which the poet continues to plumb personal experience, often in a disarmingly direct fashion: "Shall we discuss married sex?" By turns meditative, fearful, angry and loving, at their most scattershot these poems about marriage, fidelity, lust and motherhood can be disorienting for the reader, perhaps intentionally so. (Nov.)

Biography

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.