Editor’s Choice Selection in the 2015-2016 Unicorn Press First Book Competition

In Colleen Abel’s debut collection, voices from classical mythology, the sciences, and the arts explore the contours of love and passion. Through these guides, Remake contemplates what it is to be embodied—as a mind in a human body, or a spirit in the domestic body of marriage.

“Remake: The Death of Marat,” from Remake:

The child’s wail troubles the quiet.
I will pretend
to be dead, sink down
in the bath to flood my ears.
Water makes a noise
like a drawn breath. Still,
I hear his father pace the floor.
Flake-white, my skin refuses
to submerge entirely: dunes
of breasts blued with the lacework
of veins, the ruched
soft pouch of belly.
The book I’ve brought in
wisps the surface and drinks.
It will swell, unread,
another victim of interruption.
These are the politics:
the hush dagger-pierced
and I draw myself up,
irreplaceable.

COLLEEN ABEL is the author of the chapbook Housewifery (dancing girl press, 2013). A former Diane Middlebrook Fellow at UW-Madison’s Institute for Creative Writing, she has also received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. Her essays and poems have appeared in Colorado Review, The Southern Review, Pleiades, Phoebe, West Branch, and elsewhere. She lives in Wisconsin.