“Julianna Baggott amazes with the scope of her imagination. Part biographer, part ventriloquist, part genius, she inhabits characters we thought we knew—from Katharine Hepburn toHelen Keller. In reopening their lives, she is reopening history, retelling it intimately and urgently and wisely in the voices of the women themselves.Baggott's talent is almost spooky. Lizzie Borden in Love is a dangerous and elegant collection from one of America's finest young poets.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Great with Child and Tender Hooks
“Baggott's positively oracular channeling of voices as diverse as Camille Claudel and Monica Lewinsky is so canny and artfully authentic that it seems possible that the poet here has truly acted as a spiritual medium for the muted and misrepresented voices she illuminates. This is a brilliant book and an essential read for both lovers of poetry and scholars wishing to understand the inheritance of silence that is the complicated birthright of contemporary women artists everywhere.”—Erin Belieu, author of One Above and One Below and Black Box
“With crispness and casual elegance, Baggott inhabits a startling variety of personalities and idioms. These monologues are always humanist, poetic without being poeticized, and unpreachily feminist.”—Daisy Fried, author of My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again