New Books In Literature

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of her own heartbreak and sorrow. Abandoned and alone after Shelley’s death, the monster searches for a mother to fill her place. Its journey carries it across continents and time, visiting other female authors throughout the decades — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, and others. Pulling from the biographical accounts of these amazing authors, these poems beautifully examine the nature of art and creation, reading and consumption, and how monsters are really reflections of ourselves. The monster has no heart. Mary has two. There is the one she keeps in her bureau— wrapped up in silk and parchment, burnt about the edges and stinking of salt. It is the heart of the man who was her lover and it is less damaged than the heart inside her chest. That is a mangled and un-pretty thing, but she t