Who Is Mary Sue?
by Sophie Collins
2021-05-26 01:32:55
One of Bustle''s 12 Most Anticipated Poetry Collections for 2018In the language of fan fiction, a Mary Sue" is an idealized and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.Such is the s...
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One of Bustle''s 12 Most Anticipated Poetry Collections for 2018In the language of fan fiction, a Mary Sue" is an idealized and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect ; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition, and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world. Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood."
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