Cheryl Maddalena confronts the stereotypes of home life and leaves us reeling on the other side. In "CHILDREN, IT IS TIME WE HAD THE TALK," the domestic is turned on its head, reimagined and deconstructed. Her explorations are manY--sometimes charming, sometimes grotesque, sometimes ghoulishly sexy. Often all at once. Maddalena's poetry is something you've never heard or read before--incisive, uncomfortable, biting, and beautiful. Cheryl Maddalena is an iconoclast of the first class, one of the most influential poets in the poetry slam movement, and perhaps its most original voice.
Review :
In this collection, Maddalena is bravery made flesh. Each poem, whether absurd or deeply poignant, resonant or blissfully sure of its intentional claw-swipe across your expectation of poets and how seriously they take themselves, is a sure and intentional thing that makes the deepest kind of sense. The world doesn't deserve this book. It doesn't deserve the most perfect memory of a van defiled by wild animal saliva, or heart-condoms, or the sticky dissection of womanhood in a world that asks a woman to smile through her own misuse, to save everyone and ask for nothing. The world doesn't deserve the way Maddalena crafts an ending like some folks conjure magic. But you have it now, by God you have it now. Say Thank You. I certainly did.
-Melissa May, author of SparkleFat
Cheryl Maddalena's new collection CHILDREN, IT IS TIME WE HAD THE TALK is a brilliant tangle of joy and shame, magic and mundane, hilarious and haunting. Maddalena confronts with rug-pulling honesty the sometimes queasy ambivalence of being a mother, a woman, many women, sometimes Marilyn Monroe, sometimes a chainsaw juggler, and still and always a child herself. With a quick-moving kind of magic realism, the poet here is determined to jet-pack her way toward a world she can barely see on the horizon, one where we all are no longer governed by the whip of our own expectations.
-Doc Luben, author of Love Letters Or Suicide Notes, co-artistic director of Portland Poetry Slam
This collection is a wild ride of wicked, surreal fun, like Mary Poppins dispensing wisdom while on a whole lot of pills. Whether you're a mother, or have a mother, or are simply alive in these strange times, trying to cling to the bright life raft of the imagination, you need these poems. A spoonful of Maddalena's poetry helps the medicine go down.
-Mindy Nettifee, author of Sleepyhead Assassins, Rise of the Trust Fall, and Glitter in the Blood
