The Answer / La Respuesta

New poems that showcase high-art and popular culture, vamps and giant artichoke statues, and Freudian Disney dolls in a poignant exploration of cultural and personal legacies.

This heartrending and darkly playful new collection by Alexandra Teague tries to understand the edges of self in a patriarchal culture and in relation to a family history of mental illness and loss. In poems that mix high art and popular culture (from classical Greek statues to giant plaster artichokes, Cubism to Freudian Disney dolls), Teague interweaves self-reflection with the stories and lives of mythic and historic female figures, such as the dangerous-wise witch Baba Yaga and early-20th-century sculptors’ model Audrey Munson–calling across time and place to explore desire, grief, and the representation and misrepresentation of the female form.