Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr
Clemson University Press, 2022
Bandit/Queen is a polyphonic, true-crime poetry project exploring the life and unsolved murder of Belle Starr, a notorious Wild West outlaw. Born in Carthage, Missouri, in 1848, Belle Starr traded a traditional life as a wife and mother to go on the lam—thieving, marrying outlaws (six husbands in total), and providing shelter for criminal gangs, all with her signature velvet gowns and gun belts. After the media locked into her story, she became a compelling anti-hero, folk icon, and criminal mastermind. Newspapers and books fabricated details about Belle, and a mass delusion took hold. But who was Belle Starr? Who murdered her? What truth(s) can poetry excavate about a real (and mysterious) person? The lexica of true-crime culture and a cold-case investigation are refracted via persona and lyrical poems to form counter-narratives and address gaps in Belle’s received story. A feminist, queer analog to Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid, this archive-driven book merges research and verse by Margot Douaihy with illustrations by Bri Hermanson to examine and intervene with true crime, imbricated identities, (in)authenticity, and the value of emotional knowledge.
PRAISE
“I don’t know why it is that our imaginations sometimes seize on one person, not known to us in real life, as an object of study and devotion. But it’s a fact that the genius and virtue (vertu, as Machiavelli used the word, to mean excellence, honor, and power) of such a person, even far away in space and time, can be life changing or even lifesaving. Margot Douaihy’s wonderful poems about Belle Starr give us an experience of the thrilling, radical freedom with which Belle lived her life (at great cost to herself), and I’m deeply grateful for the gift.”
—Patrick Donnelly, NOCTURNES OF THE BROTHEL OF RUIN“In Bandit/Queen, Margot Douaihy burnishes Belle Starr’s legacy until it gleams, buffing layers of misogyny and sensationalism until the power and possibility of a complicated woman show through. History alone isn’t capable of imagining interiority into grave dust and brittle newspaper: it takes a poet of Douaihy’s caliber to do it, with the potency of her verbal images and Bri Hermanson’s visual ones enfleshing a ghost enough to speak.” —Zoe Tuck, TERROR MATRIX
“In an era before women could vote in the United States, Belle Starr took what she wanted, but with her sudden and still-unsolved murder, the narrative was quickly filled-in by moralists, hearsayers, and fame-chasers. Enter Margot Douaihy … Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr reinstates the outlaw Queen on her outlaw throne. This documentary poetic collection combines persona poems, journalistic remixes, and gorgeous scratchboard artwork to revise and revisit the brief career of one of the most elusive figures of the wild west.” —Petrichor Magazine
Scranton Lace
Clemson University Press, 2018
Mirroring the narrative possibilities of fabric that is both luxury and utility, Scranton Lace is queer palimpsest, a poetic study of intersections and interstices. Inspired by the demolished Scranton Lace factory, poems and illustrations interact to explore themes ranging from the time/timelessness of derelict spaces to the violence of industrialization to the architecture of internalized homophobia. The illustrations incorporate relief prints made from lace manufactured in the Scranton Lace factory in the 1920s. This documentary poetry collection meditates on the taxonomy of female transgressions, the dignity of work, and “place” as an interior/exterior experience.
PRAISE
“Scranton Lace by Margot Douaihy combines tremendous lyric gifts—dense, nervy music, evocative images, an almost classically tragic sense of life’s doomed blooming—with a gritty vernacularity that roots these poems in the rusted factory life of the title. Often formally playful but always brimming with emotion, using repetition in ways that evoke the ghostly graphics of lace woven through the book, Douaihy sings poetry’s repertoire of love, loss, time, and trial in keys that are wholly her own.” —Joy Ladin
"Margot Douaihy's Scranton Lace is a gorgeous meditation on place, on where we come from and what shapes and makes us. She speaks for anyone who's ever been too scared to go 'into the unknown, &...too scared not to.' This book immerses us into the beautiful and broken parts of ourselves in gorgeously-crafted poems." —Aaron Smith
Watch the animated trailer for Scranton Lace inspired by the atonal ghosts of violin frequencies. If visualized, the patterns of vibrations and silence might look like lace.
Covered by PBS NewsHour.
Girls Like You
Clemson University Press, 2015
28th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Finalist
PRAISE
"5 out of 5 Stars" —SAN FRANCISCO BOOK REVIEW
"Margot Douaihy spins us into the heart of living with a direct, passionate voice: …Even when I’m still, something’s clawing what’s clawing are these stunning poems, alive with bravery and crisp imagination." —Jan Beatty, author of THE BODY WARS
“Girls Like You is a masterful collection—at turns haunting, hilarious and heartbreaking. Douaihy pulls off a magic trick: by focusing our attention to deeply intimate momentsand memories, her gorgeously wrought poems conjure the epic.” —Stephen Karam, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, author of THE HUMANS and SONS OF THE PROPHET
Watch the animated trailer for Girls Like You — a queer interpretation of Plato's cave and shadow allegory.
I Would Ruby If I Could
Chapbook (Out of print, Factory Hollow Press, 2013
"Playfulness... creativity... cinematic scope … a declaration." —Philadelphia Stories
Margot Douaihy is represented by Laura Macdougall, United Agents.