Cyborg Sister

Finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize

This memoir-in-poems examines a complex family through horticulture, heterocentricism, and-wait for it!-Nancy Drew. The speaker as queerly astute girl-sleuth "cross-examines the microwave" and probes the "empty ghosts in the basement closet." The result is a page-turner in which the promise of each arresting title-among them, "Dusk Lands on Page 37 of The Whispering Statue" and "Our House is Menstruating"-is realized.

-Julie Marie Wade, judge of Charlotte Mew Contest

In Jackie Craven's gorgeous chapbook, Cyborg Sister, readers will encounter a weird, luminous world where a house menstruates, a cyborg sister removes her skin at night, and a father gifts his children with robotic roses. These whimsical poems, steeped in elements of magical realism, explore the intimate, uncanny domestic spaces of female lives.

-Sarah Giragosian, author of Queer Fish and The Death Spiral

Fusing magnificent craft with penetrating humor, Jackie Craven's Cyborg Sister provides an unforgettable critique of heteronormative standards for female behavior through its depiction of a young girl struggling with the desires and culturally condemned messiness of her own skin, while her "properly cultivated" sister is extolled for being "perfect" in every detail.

-Lisa Dordal, author of Mosaic of the Dark and Water Lessons