Refusal - by Jenny Molberg (Paperback)

About the Book

"In Refusal, her searing new collection of poetry, Jenny Molberg draws on elements of the surreal-invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons & Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide-to investigate trauma, addiction, and patriarchal forces of oppression. This confrontational collection examines societal, cultural, and personal gaslighting in situations of domestic abuse. "Love and hate simultaneously is the trick of abuse," writes Molberg, "and the trick of abuse is a vexation of the mind." A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, while a series of poems on a mother's struggle with addiction addresses the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences, following the #MeToo movement, and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs heavily on a woman's position in the world"--

Book Synopsis

In Refusal, her searing new collection of poetry, Jenny Molberg draws on elements of the uncanny--invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons & Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide--to investigate trauma, addiction, and forces of oppression. Exposing the effects of widespread toxic misogyny, this confrontational volume examines societal, cultural, and personal gaslighting in situations of domestic abuse. As Molberg writes in "Loving Ophelia Is," "love and hate simultaneously is the trick of abuse / and the trick of abuse is a vexation of the mind." A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, while another series on a mother's struggle with addiction captures the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs heavily on a woman's position in the world.

Review Quotes

Jenny Molberg has reinvented the confessional poem as a heroine's journey. A poet in the Orphic tradition, she journeys into the Underworld to rescue her speakers, her Penelope, her Ophelia, her battered and accused and underestimated and gaslighted Eurydices. She brings them line-by-exquisite-line back to the world of the living. She's nobody's fool and she knows what's at stake-- Molberg burns her Demogorgon Prince of Hell to the ground and every corner of his kingdom with him. In Refusal, she writes a world where her speakers become free to look back or forward or cast their gaze in any dark corner that could use a little light.--Kathryn Nuernberger, author of Rue

Jenny Molberg's Refusal is a book that maps the difficult journey to the top of the head, the chakra of ushering light: 'Remember them, ' she writes of those who 'will empty/their cups so you can drink.' 'Remember them, too, ' she writes of the abusers and takers, indicted in the speaker's deft acts of resurfacing and witness. 'Now let them go.' The brilliant index around which these poems spin is the image of the hospital for our previously undiagnosed wounds of the mind and spirit. In a book she dedicates to 'all writers of unsent letters, ' Molberg issues her own epistles to the world, sent off from these narrow beds that stand between obsession and freedom, trauma and resilience, memory and letting go. It is there her work sparkles: 'Self Portrait as Nothing, ' 'The Poet, ' 'The Night I Left, ' 'The Spirit Change, ' and 'Vise' are masterful, and Refusal establishes her as one of the leading poets of her generation.--David Keplinger, author of Another City, winner of the 2019 Rilke Prize

The gorgeous, seeking, brave, raging, restorative poems of Jenny Molberg's Refusal unite the reality of present traumas with figures from literary history. Here, Penelope imagines Odysseus killing her pets in a fit of love, Ophelia rolls a 20-sided die, the demogorgon attends a writer's conference, and God sets out a tea party in a forest. In these poems, imagination is an act of healing, creating hospitals to cure what our culture doesn't make space for. The poems contend with desire's insidious urge for possession and the dangerous attraction between forgiveness and cruelty. Molberg teaches me the importance of women in healing--in mothers, in friendship, in a squid as an emblematic feminist. The polyphony of voices against abuse becomes love as coalition as collective as a community. This book is my heart's hospital, my anthem of refusal.--Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

About the Author

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, and many other publications. She is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and edits Pleiades: Literature in Context.