The Bad Wife Handbook

By Rachel Zucker

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780819576118

Rachel Zucker

Rachel Zucker is the author of The Last Clear Narrative, The Bad Wife Handbook and Eating in the Underworld. She is the winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, the Center for Book Arts Award and the Salt Hill Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in many well-known journals including: 3rd Bed, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Epoch, Fence, Iowa Review, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner as well as in the Best American Poetry 2001 anthology.

Book preview

Monogamist

A human being can’t compare

size and brightness

on two occasions. So we say

the moon has a dark side.

We say the tide twice a day.

I say that man there, so unlike

my husband.

The Museum of Accidents

The school girl’s tights speckle

in the rain. In the city

the sparrow on sparrow feet skips

across my path, legs invisible.

We are bound. Similar,

indistinct forms called bodies,

our Milky Way’s spiral arms—

stars, nebulae, matter—

bound

to great disaster.

Codary

Once he was a type, kind, tide,

but became a singularity.

I stopped breathing.

Where the husband’s orbit overlaps: darkness.

No light can be shed on what lies beyond this

gravitational sheer,

harsh polarity

of wanting.

The Secret Room

Isn’t hidden. Nor filled with goods

or bodies. This feeling—

[strip the wallpaper,

knock for panels]

I can’t explain it—is always,

I think his gaze made it. I say

what I don’t intend

so as to say something of

this tending, tendency, tender

unsayable place I mean to take him.

Firmament

Below his clean shadow:

a sunlit prairie. A wheat field

from the air: plush and temperate.

The breeze is a brave caress. There is

something I see in him: tip, edge, hint

—the skin of it. Shifting wheat

over soil over cavern over water

over igneous over molten.

Monogamist

Riding a bike down a flight

of steps misnames them,

reveals their lusty gravity.

Have you heard that Brontosaurus

is a Camarasaurus head on

an Apatosaurus body?—my

love’s like that: shaped,

named beast did, did not exist.

They should be called falls, this

plummet.

Galaxies Rushing Away

I’m trying not to try to

get him into bed. Instead I try

but the husband flinches when I

and flinches when I say

I love you and I do

love you but say

I’m meeting a woman named Kate.

Then, off to the winebar, order

sancerre, nice summery white at $7/glass;

he, me, and vast millions are fast,

—red shift getting redder, every galaxy

from every galaxy, vow, promise, primordial

atom—rushing faster, all on our way

to greater disorder.

Axon, Dendrite, Rain

When he speaks I am allowed to look at him.

Let this perfect conjure slide over (all over)

the thought reaching out to my loud now—

I want to—

but find no way to make my hands

natural, accidental. I try to make his skin

a chaste idea. But even his gloves, made from slaughtered

goats, their pliable kid leather become a bias-cut

slip, myelin sheath, the impulse jumps

node-to-node, too fast for capture.

The body.

Less, less real. I am aware of wanting

to look at him. In the long space

in which others speak I cannot look at him.

take your clothes off

And I do. In dream after dream, except

last night when I’m running a long way

in the rain and, basketball in one hand, he

stands watching. And when he watches—

I run and run, do not wake up

but that—(there,) that, that, that: rain

at my window, husband in my bed.

Rhyme, Lascivious Matchmaker

Each time I try to—

here comes my