Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose

Monday Must Read: Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter

Monday Must Read!

This week meet Jeannine Hall Gailey She is the author of four books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess,She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, new in 2015 from Mayapple Press. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review and Prairie Schooner. Jeannine recently served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington.

Visit Jeannine’s web site: www.webbish6.com

Follow Jeannine on Twitter! @webbish6

Find Jeannine’s beautiful books!

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter:

http://mayapplepress.com/the-robot-scientists-daughter-jeannine-hall-gailey/

“Dazzling in its descriptions of a natural world imperiled by the hidden dangers of our nuclear past, this book presents a girl in search of the secrets of survival. In The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Jeannine Hall Gailey creates for us a world of radioactive wasps, cesium in the sunflowers, and robotic daughters. She conjures the intricate menace of the nuclear family and nuclear history, juxtaposing surreal cyborgs, mad scientists from fifties horror flicks and languid scenes of rural childhood. Mining her experience growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the writer allows the stories of the creation of the first atomic bomb, the unintended consequences of scientific discovery, and building nests for birds in the crooks of maple trees to weave together a reality at once terrifying and beautiful.The Robot Scientist’s Daughter reveals the underside of the Manhattan Project from a personal angle, and charts a woman’s – and America’s – journey towards reinvention.”

Becoming the Villainess:

http://www.steeltoebooks.com/books/3-books/books/44-becoming-the-villainess

Unexplained Fevers:

http://webbish6.com/books/unexplained-fevers/

She Returns to the Floating World:

http://webbish6.com/books/she-returns-to-the-floating-world/

Praise for Jeannine Hall Gailey’s work:

In The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Jeannine Hall Gailey charts the dangerous secrets in a nuclear family as well as a nuclear research facility. Her ecofeminist approach to the making of bombs, celebrates our fragile natural world. Full of flowers and computers, this riveting poetry captures the undeniable compromises and complexities of our times.— Denise Duhamel

What is her story? “In this story,” Jeannine Gailey tells us, “a girl grows up in a field of nuclear reactors. She gives us lessons in poison. And as we watch this heroine appear from various angles, in multiple lights we realize that just like this girl who “made birds’ nests / with mud and twigs, hoping that birds would / come live in them.” Gailey makes an archetype for a contemporary American woman whom she sees as beautiful — and damaged — and proud — and unafraid. And the Scientist? He “lives alone in a house made of snow. / If he makes music, no one hears it.” America? It builds barbed wire “to keep enemies out of its dream” – but we all are surrounded by these barbed wires of a country whose “towns melt into sunsets, into dust clouds, into faces.” In subtle, playful, courageous poems, we are witnessing a brilliant performance.— Ilya Kaminsky

More from Jeannine online!

Rattle: http://www.rattle.com/poetry/elemental-by-jeannine-hall-gailey

2River: http://www.2river.org/2RView/10_4/poems/gailey.html

Atticus Review: http://atticusreview.org/featuring-jeannine-hall-gailey/

Verse Daily! http://www.versedaily.org/2015/aboutjeanninehallgailey.shtml

Interview:

http://jackstraw.org/blog/?p=578

Hear Jeannine Read:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ0mCEbCQ-M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu5j7BjnorU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxwncJ7KACg

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary