Everything Is Real

For readers of Jeannine Hall Gailey, Emily Corwin, Sasha West, and Rebecca Lindenberg, Rita Fenstein 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.

Rita Feinstein is the author of Life on Dodge (2018), edited by Kiki Petrosino for the Mineral Point Poetry Series. Her stories and poems have appeared in Permafrost, Grist, and Willow Springs, among other publications, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. A graduate of Oregon State University's MFA program, she is currently based in Washington, DC, where she teaches creative writing to kids and teens.