Finalist for The National Poetry Series & Sarabande’s Kathryn A. Morton Prize
Selected by Denise Duhamel for The Hilary Tham Capital Collection, The Word Works, 2010
Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life
Ungar’s diabolical Charlotte Brontë: You Ruined My Life is both devilishly funny and devastatingly honest about love, sex, marriage and divorce.
“In Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life, Ungar dishes up quirky, supercharged, even gorgeous poems about love, loss, and our divorce culture. Her approach is both hilarious and gritty, laden with wordplay, irony, and tenderness, too. Formally inventive, punch-in-the-gut honest, these poems are perfect for romantics, cynics, and every kind of reader in between.” —Denise Duhamel
Order from
Praise
“‘I who undulated like an eel now mince on knife-point’: with what glittering myths our culture hooks and reels in its women. In poems at once nightmarishly excoriating and reductively witty, Barbara Louise Ungar plunges us into deep waters where these myths are seen joyously refracted.” —Nathalie Anderson
“Barbara Ungar is a ‘clever Queane,’ the grand diva of a comedic monologue that mixes sacred and not-so-sacred mythology and taboo… Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life is a song cycle for the lovelorn who need a little magic wisdom at the end of their trip to true Love Land. You will be cast under its spell.” —Daniel Nester
Poems
“Rosh Hashanah 5771”
“Rosemary’s Divorce”
“Why Don’t They Just Drop Dead”
The Nervous Breakdown
“Kabbalah Barbie”
”Visiting My Parents’ Exercise Class”
“Becoming My Father’s Mother”
The Psychoanalytic Post
“Rembrandt’s Lucretia”
“The Brank”
Painters and Poets
“The Middle-Aged Mermaid”
Chronogram
“Like Being Alive Twice”
Poemeleon
“Moccasins”
Rabbit Reader