Twinzilla (Paperback)

With her irreverent wordplay, Hagerty digs to the roots of language itself, showing the unbreakable links between our inner and outer worlds, and between the world that is "real" and the worlds we can imagine. Her fearless alter-ego, Twinzilla, reawakens in even the most jaded post-modern reader all the powerful fizz our planet needs. 2013 Judge Jeanne Larsen describes falling in love with this book: "The poems in Twinzilla are smart, teasing, dead-serious, marked by keen intelligence and inventive language. Hagerty takes us into a world where 'metaphysics are like candy.' Her narratives leap, inventive and rewarding, embracing motherhood and daughter-hood, scrutinizing questions of meaning and embodiment, weaving from the elegiac to the wryly joyful, showing forth the ways we shadow our own selves. Oh, this is good stuff." Poet Sandra Beasley describes this unique poetry collection: "Time to take Doggerel for a walk," says TWINZILLA, unleashing this ebullient collection from South Carolina poet Barbara H. G. Hagerty. Hagerty introduces us to three essential forces: Eros, Thanatos, and Twinzilla, the duality that complicates our sense of self as life progresses. Who once was temptation, becomes comfort, a "knight-in-shining anorak." Who once was daughter, becomes mother--"I was entered and exited, / I exuded and extruded, / earth moved through me, / film, magma, flesh"--and, later, becomes child again, to care for a dying parent. Poignant stories are balanced with flights of wordplay and taxonomy, examining the strangeness of lumps, slugs, doorbells and dead ringers. "All is collage, to be continued," declares "Quantum Twinzilla." Readers will not want this conversation to end.