EveryHerDies

In Jennifer MacBain-Stephens' startlingly collection EveryHerDies, the reader is unsentimentally transformed by a cast of two women, a girl, and the local deer herd decimated by Epizootic Hemorrhagic disease. A young narrator who "pretended to look through People," leads us through the horror.

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Praise for EveryHerDies

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

About the Author

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens graduated from New York University, and currently lives in Iowa City, IA. She is the author of the chapbook “EveryHerDies,” (ELJ Publications, forthcoming 2014.) She has written four YA non-fiction books and has poems published in Emerge Literary Journal, Superstition Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Thirteen Myna Birds, Gravel Magazine, Scapegoat Review, *82 Review, Burningwood Journal, Rufous City Review, Menacing Hedge, Stirring, Eunoia Review, Bitterzoet Magazine, and other journals online and in print. She participated in Iowa City’s 2013 Poetry in Public Project and was recently nominated for Best of the Net. Jennifer is currently revising two chapbooks, working on a full length collection, and writing for Insecurity Ragazine (she likes to call her work there “sort of creative non-fiction.”) For a complete list of publications and other odds and ends, visit: http://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/

EveryHerDies

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About the Author

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