Double Jinx

July 20, 2015
In her debut collection, Reddy plays with a variety of forms as she weaves sharp images and dark narratives about femininity, faith, and family. Exploring the sinister side of girlhood/womanhood, Reddy imagines Nancy Drew facing off with a lookalike: “She’s a foxtrot. She’s a jinx and you can’t speak,” or perhaps “she’s the real Nancy/ and you’re a costume party.” Addressing the more quotidian anxiety of female adolescence, one poem’s subject is reminded of how “Saturdays were dancing days” when the “boys danced slow with other girls, your homely cousins/ and your classmates.” There are allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Helen of Troy, whose less-pretty sister “stays home and simmers.” A series of epistles alternately address a former lover and his current partner, and Reddy also investigates a familial cycle of violence: “For a year my father beat anything that moved,” and “My father’s father was a woodstove. He snapped and roared.” In the sonnet crown “Our Wilderness Period,” she delivers a bleak parable about belief, sin, and a people abandoned by God for which the speaker, another jealous sister, feels responsible. Reddy channels the vibe and energy of Plath and Sexton, but it’s her arresting language that’s the real draw here.

October 15, 2015

Reddy's first collection, selected by Alan Lemon for the National Poetry Series, features a creepy Nancy Drew caught up with a slippery doppelganger. Entries such as "The Case of the Double Jinx" and "The Secret Nancy," which have delicious subtitles such as "The Clue in the Breakfast Nook," "The Case of the Disappearing Husbands," and "The Clue at the Abandoned Drive- In," showcase Reddy's affinity for the long poem. Her taut line moves quickly, often with internal rhyme and smart enjambments: "Nancy knows/ good girls wear gloves to drive/ and wash the dishes, wear slips and stockings/ under summer dresses. She won't. She's off the plot." Reddy's topic is buffeted female identity and its warring personae, as she moves from beauty queen to Cinderella, from a religious pilgrim to magician's assistant to the discovery of the oldest human fossil: "Her bones became a body/ in their hands." Although a few poems lean toward the maudlin, the best show intelligence, spirit, and a good ear. VERDICT A strong first book prize winner that takes up female identity as shaped by the inseparable maelstroms of girlhood and intimacy.--Ellen Kaufman, New York

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