Book of Hulga
Part fan fiction, part hagiography, part graphic poetry, The Book of Hulga wrestles with the long shadow of Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Catholic writer who wrote about roadside killers, racists, and wooden legs. The poems ask what use can be made of suffering and in what ways are we defined by absence, and they look to the same sources that O’Connor looked to for answers, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to the French philosopher Simone Weil. The Book of Hulga allows the reader to get closer to O’Connor while also acknowledging that each of us has an inner Hulga, a self that rigidly refuses joy, but who just might find it anyway.
Nine original illustrations by Julie Franki further illuminate this verse biography of an imagined modern-day hillbilly saint.
Rita Mae Reese
Rita Mae Reese is the author of the poetry collections The Book of Hulga, which won the Felix Pollak Prize, and The Alphabet Conspiracy, which won the Drake Emerging Writers Award. She earned her MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a past Wallace Stegner Fellow. A native of West Virginia, she lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she co-manages the Arts + Literature Laboratory.