Wager

Abstract

Wager is a poetry collection that wrestles with the speaker's perceived failures as a woman, as a recovering addict, as a daughter to a devoted Catholic mother, as a non-traditional academic and as a sexual and damaged body. Wager features the oppression of the female body and importantly exposes how that body can be an agent of its own demise. Mothers and mothering are central to the collection's objectives and are yet another way that the speaker sees herself as inadequate, but also as secured. Wager is vernacular but also pulls from the speaker's more current experiences in academia. The collection aims to challenge what an academic is, what a mother is, what a woman is, what a lover is, etc., and does this through language as well as narrative. Formally the collection varies widely, including list poems, persona poems, prose poems, poems in a series, ultra-talk poems and highly lyrical pieces. The speaker is a playful and brutally introspective poet who writes about loss with an empowered female voice, and Wager showcases the complications of being that type of woman — self-centered and unapologetic but filled with socially seeded self-doubt. While the poems are dense with frustration and guilt, they are not helpless in the face of these emotions. They are self-aware; they choose, and while they sometimes regret, they also celebrate and accuse.