Said the Manic to the Muse - by Jeanann Verlee (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Jeanann Verlee's second book, Said the Manic to the Muse , takes a deeper, more focused look at the erratic, whimsical, ominous, and sometimes perilous ways manic depression functions.
Introduced through the careful prophecy of three archetypes: Medea, Jezebel, and Kali-each a woman largely misrepresented and wholly misunderstood-these poems detail the story of one woman's struggle to maintain both strength and sanity in the face of abandonment and aging.
From dangerous trysts and barroom brawls to "grief-induced psychosis," Said the Manic to the Muse recounts the year she lost everything, including her mind.

Review Quotes

"In The Laugh of the Medusa Cixous writes, 'Where is the ebullient infinite woman who...hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a...divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster?' I say Verlee is one of the women Cixous was writing toward. In Said the Manic to the Muse, Verlee's clear-eyed vision, lyricism, and courage take us through a world of mythologies and histories where the personal, as it does, sometimes mirrors and sometimes contradicts the world that forged and imagined it. Here we have pure courage and craft. A work, it seems, committed to saying what is true, and so (and so!): these poems are simultaneously poems of killing and surviving old ways of seeing. This book, in many ways, becomes an elegy to the selves, and an ode to fought-for sight."

--Aracelis Girmay, author of Teeth and Kingdom Animalia

"Say gotdam. Say country hard. Say poetry, a raw convulsive kind. Say breadcrumbs and landmines. Say thorn wedged in the left lung, say unforgiving itch. Say simple things. Knife. Whiskey. The clean kill. Say woman with skills. Say Jeanann is the real deal, a tiny hand pressed through the sternum and pulling out a trembling canary. Said the Manic to the Muse. Say it again: Gotdam!"

--John Murillo, author of Up Jump the Boogie

"In her second collection, Jeanann Verlee continues her searing exploration of the body as a place of danger and impossible resilience. 'Each cage is a love poem, ' she writes, and it is through such disarming contradictions that these poems charge themselves with inexhaustible discovery, each line built 'from the purest napalm.' Verlee knows that the act of writing is never removed from the act of living in a world bent on extinguishing its most vital voices. As such, this is poetry at its most urgent and courageous calibers. No one is off the hook--and how lucky we are, indeed, to be caught by these words."

--Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds

About the Author

Jeanann Verlee is a poet, editor, activist, and former punk rocker who collects tattoos and winks at boys. Author of Racing Hummingbirds , recipient of the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in Poetry, her work also appears in The New York Quarterly, FRiGG, PANK, and decomP, among others. An acclaimed performance poet, she has represented NYC six times at National Poetry Slam competitions, performs and facilitates workshops across North America, and curates the Urbana Poetry Slam series at the Bowery Poetry Club. She lives in New York City with her dog and a pair of origami lovebirds.