Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Two American women, born a generation apart, surf the feminist third wave in these thirteen thematically linked and formally innovative lyric essays. Julie Marie Wade was born the day Denise Duhamel took her first college class. Duhamel published her first poetry book Smile! in 1993, the year Wade entered high school. Duhamel's writing helped to shape the third wave of Wade's emerging feminist experience. Wade came of age reading Duhamel's confessional poetry but was also influenced by what James Atlas of The New York Times named "the age of literary memoir" in 1996. As a consequence, Wade grew comfortable genre-bending and writing hybrid prose. These writers met in 2012 when Wade was hired to teach in the MFA program at Florida International University where Duhamel had been teaching for more than a decade. Duhamel was mesmerized by Wade's work, although her own past collaborations had been in poetry. When Wade asked her new colleague why she didn't write nonfiction, Duhamel said, "I would, if I could write it with you!" THE UNRHYMABLES {COLLABORATIONS IN PROSE} is a dual female reading experience that navigates the social clock, desire across the gendered spectrum, marriage, divorce, fertility/non-motherhood, violence, and body image with humor, poignancy, thoughtful reflection, and striking narrative scenes. Duhamel (b. 1961) and Wade (b. 1979) harmonize their unique voices that bracket "Generation X."

THE UNRHYMABLES: Collaborations in Prose

Literature & Fiction

Wade, Julie Marie

Duhamel, Denise

Essays & Correspondence

Noctuary Press

You have a history, and a body. You are a history, and a body. Your body has (is) a history, too. As a girl, Julie Marie Wade was uninterested in makeup, boy-watching, and other trappings of conventional girlhood, much to her mother’s disappointment. Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe—movie stars immortalized as feminine ideals, even as they both died tragically and young—were lodestars that threw Wade’s own definition of beauty into relief as she stumbled into adulthood. Now, in Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, Wade traces the intimate story of coming of age in one particular body (as a lesbian, an only child, a Protestant attending Catholic school). She uses the language and tenets of music, math, religion, fairy tales, poetry, and art to reckon with the many facets of embodiment, sexuality, and love in our contemporary world. The diet industry, popular culture, and her own family all provide rich material for what is ultimately a lyrical and unflinching investigation into the questions that prickle deep within the human heart.

Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (21st Century Essays)

Mad Creek Books

Why SIX? Because the collection is composed of six poems. And because the perspective in this collection shifts like a kaleidoscope, each image viewable from six possible angles. And because these poems, like the prevalent hexagons of the natural world―honeycombs, for instance―derive strength from their compression and their accumulation. “I call six times just to be sure you heard,” this speaker announces on the first page. These poems are also the six calls―calls to attention, calls to action, calls to account for something of our own. The speaker in SIX is insistent, scrupulous, and unflinching as she plumbs six essential aspects of human experience that have shaped us all: art, language, desire, vocation, faith, and life-changing love.

Poetry

Red Hen Press

&nbsp;A personal lyrical essay collection by a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. &nbsp; "I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet," writes Julie Marie Wade in Otherwise. In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism. As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author's self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life. &nbsp;

Otherwise: Essays

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Autumn House Press

Literary Nonfiction. "TELEPHONE is, for me, a stellar example of what can be achieved in collaborative work where two voices figure out how to link connective threads that bring out the best in each of their words, images, and narrative flourishes. This is a real gift of a book, one I hope to keep learning from."--Hanif Abdurraqib "Miller and Wade's TELEPHONE is a polyphonic emergency. These divinely nostalgic and politely oracular essays,--are they essays? watch them essai,--pursue the maximum boundaries of genre, and there, in the peripheries, together, we reach into our pockets to read their decoded message: I love."--Lily Hoang "Wade and Miller's collaborative essay collection, TELEPHONE, stretches the possibilities of the form, creating a kind of thought puzzle that you're happy to never truly solve. Their voices bounce and blend, weave and bob, in a way that seems almost impossible and magical. TELEPHONE is a testament to the power of voice and the beauty of collaborative art."--Steven Church "TELEPHONE is unusual, thoughtful and compelling. The two voices together are clever, passionate, entertaining and intriguing. TELEPHONE pushes the boundaries and demonstrates the power and potential of the creative nonfiction genre."--Lee Gutkind "Miller and Wade's marvelous TELEPHONE takes the ordinary--cars, exercise, toys, sex--and elevates it to the extraordinary. Each subject is subjected to lyrical rendering and astonishing interpretation. TELEPHONE stuns us with its burnished music, its use of form, and its brilliant musings on seemingly quotidian subjects. In these twin-voiced essays is a celebration of narrative's thrall, but also a liberation blueprint that frees us from the tyranny of a single self, a single story."--James Allen Hall

Telephone: Essays in Two Voices

Miller,Brenda

Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Go ahead, tell me-what words do you love? For to love a word is to love the sound it makes. To love a word is to hear the bells in it; to use a word out of love is to become a bell-ringer, which is also to say, a campanologist. In this book-length essay, Julie Marie Wade writes a sonic autobiography, a gorgeous inquiry into language, sound, and history.

Fugue: an Aural History

New Michigan Press

"Postage Due is a dazzling series of necessary utterances. Wade uses the language of Christianity to section her book, fraught with joy and pain, to explore what we owe and to whom. She employs postcards, letters, and literary and pop culture heroines—most notably Oz's Dorothy—to tell and retell of the dreamlike past. In Postage Due, you will meet the (post-confessional) young lady who fell from a star."—Denise Duhamel
Postage Due is a sometimes ekphrastic, often epistolary scrapbook of poetic artifacts documenting an odd girl's coming of age.
Julie Marie Wade is the author of two collections of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures and Small Fires.

Postage Due (Marie Alexander Poetry Series, 16)

White Pine Press

This is a daughter’s story. In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade recreates the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker’s care, then turns that precise attention on herself. There are floating tea lights in the bath, coddled blossoms in the garden, and a mother straddling her teenage daughter’s back, astringent in hand, to better scrub her not-quite-presentable pores. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses. Small Fires is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing, reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the questionwhat have you given up in order to become who you are?

Small Fires: Essays (Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature)

Arts & Literature

Sarabande Books

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Julie Marie Wade's lush post-confessional poems are unabashed in their desire, tentative then bold in their knowledge. They're sparkly talismans to transform and transport us, delicacies with creamy insides to fill us up. WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT is a profound 'before and after' examination of the self, complete with cultural and family commentary—delightful, heartbreaking, magic and real stories with a multitude of prepositions to guide us: a gifted young poet's coming to, coming out, coming jubilantly back into self."—Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton

When I Was Straight (Body Language, 11)

A Midsummer Night's Press

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. This new printing has French flaps. "Julie Marie Wade's lush post-confessional poems are unabashed in their desire, tentative then bold in their knowledge. They're sparkly talismans to transform and transport us, delicacies with creamy insides to fill us up. WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT is a profound 'before and after' examination of the self, complete with cultural and family commentary--delightful, heartbreaking, magic and real stories with a multitude of prepositions to guide us: a gifted young poet's coming to, coming out, coming jubilantly back into self."--Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton

When I Was Straight

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