In
Adrift a Fourth Wave
,
Brenda Nicholas offers a postmodern world-a theme park wasteland of billboards, magazine tear-outs, movie clips, and reruns, revealing double standards, trick mirrors, and misogynistic marketing. With brave poems that roil between tender and fierce, Nicholas guides her readers on an un-lazy river ride through dioramas of memory and message to a subliminal ocean where women are cast to be naked and behave. She suggests that the wreckage we wake from we can survive.
-Tanya Grae, author of
Undoll
In this technicolor lament, Brenda Nicholas skillfully untangles the funhouse front America has forced women to "belly" for centuries. Whether the speaker is a Disney princess, a Bratz doll, a teen mom, or a divorcee, the women in
are forced to "Frankenstein" even their most intimate relationships into existence and to make sense of beauty in a world that farcically claims to be post-Barbie. Anyone who has ever sought to turn the "bamboozled" into the beautiful or gathered the courage "to change a shoreline" will find a companion in Nicholas' charged and stunning debut,
Adrift a Fourth Wave.
-Alexa Doran, author of
DM Me, Mother Darling
Brenda Nicholas's
reports from the front lines to set feminisms to music, with mothers and daughters, fast cars, and a 19-year-old babysitter who travels through time. Through intersections of pop culture imagery and shapeshifting timelines, Nicholas 'eats roses for breakfast, ' re-examines a postfeminist Little Red Riding Hood, and gives voice to Bratz Dolls and Farrah Fawcett. Nicholas's bravura performance reminds us how poetry can embrace both uncertainty and beauty in all the madness.
-Daniel Nester, author of
Shader
and
How to be Inappropriate