Kirjahaku

It all started at the pool party. He was there, I was there, and our friends thought we'd be perfect for each other. Not only is Tom McCullin a hockey player on my favorite team, he's also a gorgeous, glove-dropping defenseman straight out of my wildest fantasies. He's almost too good to be true. His teammates call him Micky, but to me he's Tom. And damn it all if the chemistry between us doesn't wind up being amazing. Turns out we can't keep our hands off each other, but it's our secret. We're not ready to share what we have with anyone else. So, while our friends keep wondering why things aren't happening between us, little do they know that I'm already... Kissing Micky.

"Love at first sight." It's such a clich . But when I saw her across a crowded room I couldn't take my eyes off her.One can say I'm the modest type. I don't walk up to a girl, introduce myself and expect her to fall at my feet just because I'm a NHL player. If friends didn't give me a little push me in her direction, I probably never would have approached her. But I'm so glad I did.The electricity between us blew me away. From our first kiss to the first night we spent together it was clear. Paige was the one.But something is holding her back, And with the trade deadline looming, she's using it as an excuse to push me away.Luckily, I know how to chase dreams; it's how I made it to the NHL. I like a challenge, and I never quit until I get what I want. And what I want is Paige.

Ellen Devlin's Rita is as subversive as it is wise. Rita's sassy "talk backs" to heroines from the canon may be feminist retellings but Devlin's project is more complex. Each insightful warning, discussion, or interrogation (with female characters of carefully chosen seminal texts) explores necessary questions of identity, agency, free will, power, and complicity. These poems are instruments of power--asserting, imagining, describing what it's like to be a woman today. I wish I read this book when I was a young woman. This is no ordinary debut collection; Devlin's attention to craft is masterful and her language fresh and fierce. "The windows and doors are locked and I can feel/ my mother's life barreling towards me." --Jennifer Franklin author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018)