Micheline Maylor's The Bad Wife is an intimate, first-hand account of how to ruin a marriage. This is a story of divorce, love, and what should have been, told in a brave and unflinching voice. Pulling the reader into a startling web of sensuality, guilt, resentment, and pleasure, this collection asks: what if you set off a bomb in your own house? What if you lose love and destroy everything you ever knew? These poems have a disarming immediacy, full of surprising imagery, dark humour, and the bold thoughts of a vibrant and flawed protagonist. Balancing a need for wildness and the space to dwell, The Bad Wife explores the taut confines of those vivid, earthly pleasures that we all know and sometimes can't escape.
I forgot the oath:
Do no harm.
-from "Yesterday, I Went to the Market" Maylor's The Bad Wife is an intimate, first-hand account of how to ruin a marriage. "These poems will wreck your home, wake you up with their noisy sex, devastate like a Wall Street banker on a Saturday night bender. These poems will sober you up in the morning with the strength of flowers, of prayer flags. These poems understand everything you've lived through. They show you where you live." "Micheline Maylor is Canada's Anne Sexton. To understand The Bad Wife, imagine Sexton on stage in 'cum-fuck-me-shoes,' perhaps chain-smoking, belting out Walt Whitman's lost one-woman show about Helen of Troy. Linguistically inventive, surreal, playful, and ruthlessly honest, Maylor wades into the swamp of divorce, emerging with almost unbearable images of humiliation, devastation, joy, and praise. 'I've been,' she exclaims, 'a home wrecker, / witch, savior, mentor, mother. Let me tell you, I have been all / those things.' In these confessional poems, Maylor-without a whiff of virtue signaling-places her own psyche and body under the microscope, as great artists do." "By turns ornithological, scatological, geological, and meteorological imagery thread the poems together in a firsthand account of a midlife crisis, surreal and psychological, that fascinates with its psychic energy and playfulness." Gillian Harding-Russell, Arc Poetry, June 2023 [Full review at https://arcpoetry.ca/editorials/the-crows-salvage-and-redemption-micheline-maylors-the-bad-wife] # 6 on the Calgary Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, April 11, 2024 Contents
1 How to Become a Bad Wife
2 Epithalamion: The Grand Canyon was a Long Way Down
3 The Mean Game
4 Yesterday, I went to the market
5 The Crow Takes the Body
6 Scrapbook
7 Your Motto
8 The Sleep
9 The Bad Wife's Ankle
10 Two Men
11 How To Become A Bad Mother
12 (N)Ever Thought
13 How to Have Encounters with Foxes
14 The Danger of Georgian Guest Houses
15 The Bad Wife's Clavicle
16 The Pine Siskin
17 And Let's Not Forget Christina Lake
18 The Crow Gives a Body
19 The Bad Wife's Vulva
20 Portrait of My Life as a Nurse Log
21 Guilt
22 Divorce Sudoku
23 So, Say I
24 The Moral Responsibility to be Intelligent
25 This is My 21st Wedding Anniversary
26 Don't Feed the Animals
27 She tells me
28 There is No Word
29 Reasons for My Husband's Inattentiveness
30 Styx and Stones
31 Vagabond
32 How to Be a Bad Ex-Wife
33 Double Fisting
34 Become
35 No Matter the Shape of Things, You are Much Missed
36 Inclement Weather
40 Omen: Calla Lilies
73 Notes
75 Acknowledgements
77 Prologue: On Our First/Last Toast
79 Epilogue
