Wedding Pulls

The title of J.K. Daniels’s first book, Wedding Pulls, comes from a Victorian custom that persists in contemporary New Orleans: charms baked in or iced to a wedding cake are pulled out by the unmarried attendants. The charms, supposedly, predict who will marry next and who won’t, who will be richer and who poorer. In sensual, sonically charged language, the poems in Wedding Pulls interrogate what it means to be wedded, lawfully or not. In personas from Eurydice to Eve to Alice B. Toklas, the poems complicate the traditional notions, the “meager plot,” of marriage and family while exploring the enduring pull of intimacy. Intricately wrought, the poems blend experimental and traditional aesthetics to create mythic landscapes with speakers who ponder what it means to have (or not) and to hold (or not) until death do us part. Inspired by Shakespeare and Stein, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Harryette Mullen, these witty poems riff on art and myth, and the fate that is family.