My book Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience was released this spring from Lavender Ink. I thought I’d post an update about what’s been happening since it’s release. Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience is a campy, contemporary retelling of the Bluebeard myth, that charts the love of three sisters who each marry the same man upon the demise of the sister who preceded her. Bluebeard is usually framed as a story of blood and gore, but this telling focuses on the love each of his unfortunate wives felt, the first blush of romance and young marriage, the complicated turns of mature desire and the past we bring into our present affections.
I’ve given readings from my new book in West Virginia, Nebraska, Illinois, and elsewhere, including at the Nebraska Book Festival in April. There’s a YouTube playlist of poems from the book.
Recently, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with sister poet Sara Henning about her Lavender Ink title A Sweeter Water in The Sundress Blog. I was able to talk about reading and researching the bluebeard myth, as well as her own smart, lovely book.
My mother had a baby blue hardback edition of the Grimm fairy tales, one with gold embossed lettering on the cover and edge gilding. Sometimes at bedtime we were allowed to crawl into her queen-sized bed and she would read us a story from those pages of onion skin, those tiny words, under that soft glow of her bedside light. I’m not sure if she read the versions of the bluebeard story from Grimm to us, but it was a story I recognized later while I was working on my masters degree in women’s studies at the University of Arizona.
I also spoke with sibling poet Megan Burns about her Lavender Ink title Sound and Basin in Pank. I discussed the interconnectiveness of desire and violence within the bluebeard myth.
If fairy tales and myths are meant to be didactic, even if we no longer live in the time of their original construction, I wrote Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience because I was curious to know what it offered us today. I kept coming back to a line from Charles Dickens’ version: “But the fair twin loved him, and the dark twin hated him, so he chose the fair one.” I thought about hate and resentment and marriage and why we might stay with someone, sensing the threat of bodily harm towards us, even if that violence isn’t manifested until our murder. I also was working within the bluebeard frame and the ways in which each of the sisters may have been aware of plot—a meta-awareness of the larger story their small place fit into—much as any of us may reflect on our place in plot (e.g. marriage, American Dream, keeping up with Jones’, etc.) even as we may (or may not) think of them as story lines, narratives, fiction. The sister in “Self-Portrait” chose to desire a violent man. Or perhaps he chose her. Or perhaps, she was framed and so thus framed, was made to be what she became.
I also talked about Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience on KIOS-FM, Omaha Public Radio and read from the book on air. Here are a few mp3s from that reading and more.
Fruits
Widower’s Insomnia
Our Sister Cared
The Blue Funeral
Right after the book’s release, I featured the cover artist Lauren Rindaldi about her gorgeous cover art. Here’s Lauren’s artist description of the piece:
Desire’s Conquest and Demise
The Nightmare, which depicts an incubus, a horse and a sleeping woman. In my painting, the incubus is replaced by my deceased cat. The woman takes a position believed to encourage nightmares, and the horse (or mare), in my piece, is replaced by another woman. It is meant to simultaneously show a woman dreaming and the contents of her dream or fantasy. This painting is part of my most recent series of works exploring ideas about the pursuit of fantasies resulting in deterioration, decay or even death.
Here’s some praise about my new book.
Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience is an ingenious narrative of poems that transposes the Bluebeard myth to our contemporary lives with a chilling authenticity. The juxtapositions of desire and danger, trust and betrayal, innocence and cunning all seem absolutely modern, as if they could be happening down the street or in our own lives, even as we recognize their ancient, terrible truths. Laura Madeline Wiseman’s command of the language and balance between irony and dead seriousness is pitch-perfect and this is a haunting book. - Ellen Bass
What happens when a woman dares to enter forbidden spaces? Tucked into legend, the poems in this collection shift from sensual to sexy and from enchanting to haunting, as they explore the question. Laura Madeline Wiseman is both poet and storyteller, deftly moving back and forth through time, weaving breathtaking parts into a heart-stopping whole. - Tania Rochelle
Predicated on the Bluebeard tale, Wiseman weaves a contemporary mythology that reaches more deeply and pervasively into the very human psychology and psychosis we name love. These poems traverse a dark storm of sexuality—the forbidden, the cruel, the guilty-pleasures. Lunacy and denial pulse mysteriously as mating ritual, as in these lines from “Solo Artist, Another Late Wife”: “…and she pretends for a moment / that this cheap condo is Carnegie Hall and his hands / that rain down on her are applause…” Control and conviction are knives bladed as sharply as the key to truth. Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience is erotic, disturbing, and utterly compelling. This collection, the stuff of nightmarish transformations, may cause you to see an altered face when you gaze in your day-lit mirror. - Lana Hechtman Ayers
Wiseman’s imagination is expansive, sultry, and wild. Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience is a masterpiece of antonyms. Wiseman’s speaker first appears to be a traditional woman: married, want of secrets, but curious and complex. Like many women, she wrestles with society’s fetters, which is easily identifiable and sympathetic. It is in this way she acts as a great literary heroine; the reader, perhaps lost themselves, roots for her to find her footing. Just as we think we have her understood, the book quickly transforms from a biography of a marriage into a lesson in the subversive. Wiseman’s speaker does reference work in the taboo. She struggles with the direction of her sexuality, fidelity, even marrying her late sister’s dangerous husband seems to be out of her control. She has simultaneous desires: to be dominant, to be taken, to be voyeur/watched, to be pursued/left alone, to be safe, to be killed. Ultimately, this book begs the question: how well can we ever know those closest to us? And perhaps more importantly, how well can we ever know ourselves? - Danielle Sellers
Drawing from Bluebeard and other renderings of misogynistic myth, Wiseman captures the universal experience of love skewed by an imbalance of power. Seduction, eroticism, betrayal, self-knowledge in the aftermath—it’s all here in this beautiful book, in fierce, aching lines chiseled with elegance and compression. - Rebecca Foust
What’s next? I’ll be on the local radio on The Joy Factor next week.
Interview on The Joy Factor with Shelia Stratton
6:00-6:30 pm, June 24th, 2014
89.3, KZUM FM & HD (radio)
Lincoln, NE’s community radio
I’ll also be reading from this book and more soon. I hope to see you there!
Reading in the Wit Rabbit Reading Series
with Lavender Ink Poets Sara Henning & Megan Burns
7 pm, Tuesday September 2, 2014
Quencher’s Saloon
2401 N. Western, Ave.
Chicago, IL
Reading in the Smoking Glue Gun‘s Sunchild Austin Summer Readings
with Christopher Klingbeil, Jerrod Bohn, Kendra Fortmeyer, & Kelly Luce
Sundown, Friday, September 26, 2014
SSG House, 2845 B San Gabriel St.
Austin, Texas
Poetry & Pints Reading
with Lavender Ink Poets Megan Burns & Sara Henning
8 pm, Sunday, November 16, 2014
Harmony Brewing Company
1551 Lake Drive Southeast
Grand Rapids, MI 49506
