Quietly radical and intellectually precise.
Morrissey blends poetic biography with quiet literary reflection in his latest book. Written as sonnets and prose addressed directly to Mary Shelley, the work forgoes a conventional life narrative in favor of a deeply human portrait—one shaped by loss, persistence, and an unyielding creative spirit. A central preoccupation of the book is inheritance: emotional, intellectual, and moral. Morrissey repeatedly returns to the death of Shelley’s mother shortly after her birth, presenting it as a defining rupture rather than a background fact. This absence surfaces again and again, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. In one early poem, Shelley is imagined as “a lonely little girl / burdened with that and a clever mind / out of time,” a line that encapsulates the book’s understanding of grief as both wound and inheritance.
The sonnets themselves are formal without rigidity. Morrissey uses structure as a means of containment, allowing emotion to surface gradually rather than erupt. His language is controlled, precise, and largely unadorned. The poems speak to Shelley, but they also speak through her, inhabiting her historical moment while maintaining a clear-eyed awareness of how her legacy has been shaped and constrained. As one poem observes, “You present an image we may associate / with the Brontës upon their rainswept moors. / We understand rewriting one’s childhood.” Love, in its many forms—familial, romantic, intellectual—threads quietly through the collection. It does not resolve grief but exists alongside it, shaped by endurance rather than consolation. At times, devotion shades into surrender; at others, attachment becomes a quiet test of survival. This dynamic is distilled in the acknowledgment of solitude and persistence that recurs throughout the book.
Although Frankenstein remains central to the book, Morrissey resists treating it as Shelley’s sole defining achievement: he constructs the novel as an extension of her intellectual formation and personal history. This approach is particularly effective in “Resurrection,” where the creature’s lost voice is used to reflect Shelley’s own historical erasure: “Articulate, impassioned / yet rational… Even still, his story / is buried beneath Victor’s and Walton’s.” The poem does not merely interpret the novel; it interrogates the cultural forces that muted both creator and creation. The prose sections provide historical grounding without academic detachment, reinforcing the sense of a conversation carried across centuries.
Measured, disciplined, and emotionally resonant, this is an extended poetic love letter—one that honors not only Mary Shelley’s achievement, but the cost at which it was earned. A stunner.
Twelve Winters Press
Pub date January 1, 2026
ISBN 979-8993321509
Print Length 120
Price $26.52 (USD) Hardcover