A courageous and innovative ode to monogamy and its challenges
Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.
“I love this book's fearless engagement with the impossibility of marriage; gorgeously Zucker combines prosaic thoroughness with stopped-time incandescence. If The Bad Wife Handbook is the manifesto for a new movement, sign me up!”—Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films: New Poems
“Zucker has the confessionalist's knack for turning personal and difficult into universal and transcendent, and the experimentalist's gift for fearless, associative play. The combination is unsettling and ground-breaking: a vitally necessary book for our age.”—Arielle Greenberg, author of My Kafka Century
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From the Book:
Wane, wax, wobble.
My mind is a map of hunger.
They say Abulafia could stop his heart
with one letter. Alef
lodged in his semi-lunar valve.
Small e after breath
is what I do to keep living.
—from “Sex”
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RACHEL ZUCKER is the author of The Last Clear Narrative (2004) and Eating in the Underworld (2003), and winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize and the Center for Book Arts Award.
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This project is supported in part by an award from the
 National Endowment for the Arts
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