Books

NASA has assured everyone the passage of rogue planet Malachite will be safe, but Crosby’s been getting other messages—from a fortune teller and Malachite truther message boards. And now she believes that Malachite will kill everyone who doesn’t ascend to the fourth dimension—a higher plane that transcends physicality.

She tries to prepare her friends and family to leave their bodies behind and raise their frequency by changing their diets, wearing the right crystals, and moving into her friend’s bunker before it’s too late. But no one is listening.

The more time she spends trying to talk her roommate and her quirky friends into her apocalypse plans, the more Crosby is forced to face the cracks in everything she believes to be true.

For readers of Jeannine Hall Gailey, Emily Corwin, Sasha West, and Rebecca Lindenberg, Rita Feinstein offers a collection of high fantasy, horror chic poetry that mesmerizes with incantations conjuring a lover. Rita Feinstein’s high-concept collection of tropey, bent, alternative fairy-tale poems interconnect to uncover the lore of a dark romantic relationship that exists in this world and others, using hybridized formal constraints to make portals and gates. This is careless, dangerous poetry spoken by a cunning heroine who wants us to believe that “all creation starts with love. And/or violence” and to conflate the two until “my name is throbbing in his throat.” Slayers are pitted against lovers, and sex is a spell that creates as often as it destroys. “Once upon a time, all women were foxes and all men were hunters,” Feinstein spins. “The older the fox, the longer she had evaded capture, the more tails she grew. Our nine-tailed heroine made running look easy. No man had touched her, and precious few had seen her.” These are poems full of songs and delicious screams.

Poet Rita Feinstein builds a planet from twenty-five sonnets of lost love, and the astrophysics is undeniable. What has more gravitational pull than loss? What is a more alien landscape than the rearrangement of a heart?

A strong narrative arc built from verse, Feinstein’s debut collection crosses Shakespeare with science fiction to launch readers into a world apart where a newly broken heart is celebrated, examined, nurtured, and let to rage, as if only the atmosphere of an entirely new planet is able to bear the process of healing. This emotionally generous collection looks at pain and love—fourteen crystalline and confessional lines at a time. Dodge, as the speaker names her planet, “is not Virginia.” It is “red because a horse heart / is red . . . Red because / that’s what I was wearing when I left,” and as the speaker fills Planet Dodge with men (because “there’s no reason for Dodge / to be this empty”), she finds “how easy it is to hate them all / after six years of loving you too much.”

Life on Dodge is a powerful cycle of confessional verse, a contemporary radio signal to Plath and Sexton, utterly unafraid of the heat and danger of reentry after the fully interstellar escape that comes after heartbreak. “Next month the pain will be less, / and the next month it will simply disappear. / For example: today you are coming to Dodge. / You are coming to take me home.”