Who Is Mary Sue?

By Sophie Collins and Sophie Collins

Book Overview

One of Bustle's 12 Most Anticipated Poetry Collections for 2018 In 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571346618
• ISBN13: 9780571346615
• Release Date: December 2018
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 7.7"