Available for purchase January 2025

With The Margaret, Miranda Dennis weaves an evocative and atmospheric series of poems into a sharp narrative of female prophecy and rage. In tight, economical lines that shave all the fat off the bone, she explores a mother-daughter bond of the uncanny, one filled with love, pride, dread, and curses. “Let’s learn war,” these women say in one breath, while in the next they prepare for the mundane trappings of an ill-fitting domesticity. Dennis writes with such a precise, acerbic righteousness that we find we want to be Margaret while also fearing her. But in these days of diminishing women’s rights, we also ultimately fear for Margaret. Throughout, Dennis paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood gone sour—“[g]ingham curtains, butcher’s knife, a stockpot” and all.

— Kate Gaskin, author of Forever War

In this spectral collection of poems, Miranda Dennis’ The Margaret sings of the myth of the daughter, of what lives beyond us, both beautiful and terrible. Margaret shimmers with possibility, transforming the ordinary—the tennis rackets, salt mines, and sealskin— into sacred relics to carry forever. Margaret is born “dusty and cobwebbed,” fatherless, precocious, begotten entirely from the speaker. And yet we must stand back as this miracle burns brightly, covered in vines, her song echoing and unfinished. We must protect her, even as we fear her, what blooms from her. Dennis’ voice in these poems is witty, tender, and brutal. “You’ve grown / so tall since yesterday,” Dennis writes. “You have so many teeth.” The Margaret seeks to understand what is born(e) from us, what lives beyond, what becomes a kingdom of her own. 

— Gale Marie Thompson, author of Mountain Amnesia

Miranda Dennis is a multi-genre writer and product marketer, who resides in Brooklyn with a cat named after a very bad nun. She's a board member of the Poetry Society of New York and co-hosts a reading series called Warm Bodies, if you ever want to catch her in the wild. Her work has been featured in Granta, the Hollins Critic, storySouth, Meridian, and more.