A new volume of poetry by Julianna Baggott has recently been released titled Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women’s Voices. A review of the book appeared today in the Lexington Herald-Leader: “Inside the minds of outsiders. Poems put words in mouths of infamous women”. You can read it here.
Of note is the critics take on Baggot’s Lizzie poems.
At the heart of the book, Lizzie Borden speaks to her trial jury. In the tradition of My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, Lizzie Borden Addresses Her Jury of Men is a dramatic monologue. It is visceral, shocking, grotesque and yet funny. Borden is depicted as a complex character, both crazy and stubborn. She speaks to the readers as a jury, saying she is not unlike them: Look again into my pale, damp face / so like your daughters’, sisters’, wives’.
My review of this collection will be published in the near future in The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
