EveryHerDiesRevised

About the Book:

In Jennifer MacBain-Stephens’ startlingly collection EveryHerDies the reader is unsentimentally transformed by cast of two women, a girl and the local deer heard decimated by Epizootic Hemorrhagic disease.  A young narrator who “pretended to look through People,” leads us through the horror. It is not just that “Deer lay in water to reduce the blood boiling fever,” and their “swollen heads” are still reaching “through fence holes” trying to get at the lovingly tended garden, but that through witnessing this localized terror MacBain-Stephens brings up questions of humanity’s relationship with the natural world and one another, reminding us “when four legs come for you, you want to be different, you want a gun,” and commenting on how women continues to sweep, cook, play music, bury the dead, empathize and even lovingly sacrifice through atrocities. She writes, “I cannot breathe. My hair wrapped around my neck. My head on the wall.”  And later, “I celebrate your carcass by putting a bow in it.” Her adapt use of sound and economy of description make the poems pulse with an eerie electricity and the hum of biting midges. ~ Shana Youngdahl author of History, Advice and Other Half-Truths

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens’ stunning cycle of poems EveryHerDies disquiets and alarms, but also emboldens with the wideness and intensity of an instinctual empathy. These poems eddy with all the soreness, painful kinship, and uneasiness of a child trying to fit the images of blue-tongued dead deer, or alive deer so decayed they must walk on their chests, into her experience. Alongside this traumatic soreness appears the Real: the warm plates of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, the crocheted toilet paper holder, the unalterable facts about the Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease that gruesomely destroyed so many white-tailed deer in Michigan. Although “Pieces of some things are dying in the backyard”, there is still Aunt Margaret with a meat pie. The deer die—the dear die—but also: “She sings of heat and hearts, throws her voice against the walls. It is a lifting.” ~ B. Elizabeth Morningsnow, author of The Whale in the Woods

 

Learn more about Jennifer here.

 

 

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What People are Saying:

In EveryHerDies, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens imagines a young Midwestern narrator trying to make sense of a world indifferent to the death of beautiful creatures. This collection of haunting prose poems speaks to the indelicacy of human nature–our desire to build fences when the pain is not ours. It is a book that makes you re-examine your relationship to the natural world. You will not see the suffering of wild creatures the same way after reading EveryHerDies. ~ Ms. Jackie

This book leaves an apocalyptic mark on the psyche. Short, riveting, to the point. The poet gets her hooks in you with vivid tales of a landscape that seems otherworldly, or of science fiction, but are all to real. I highly recommend this for anyone who loves poetry, and being challenged by something unique and new. ~ Larry Sizemore