Wasp Queen

From the Los Angeles Review's review of Wasp Queen: It s easy to allow Claudia Cortese s Wasp Queen to transport readers to the dark corners of physically-abused, possibly-schizophrenic heroine Lucy. . . I kill cheerleaders, bitch, Lucy smoothly terrorizes a rival during an anonymous phone call. She commands a boy to give her hickeys, and she fantasizes about her mother s death in a plane crash. But despite this strange behavior, Lucy is a hero for our age: bold, flawed, furious, and able to hold her own in a world that hates her. Wasp Queen centers on body image. While the neighborhood girls call our heroine, Lucy Fat Face, Ugly, Stupid, Miss Lardy Lard, Lucy replies that her tormentors are . . . the skin // of drums I bang // to break. Lucy s selfies are snapped amid Oreos, chocolate ice cream, / last slice of pizza in the box. . . . At least a third of the collection s poems address the danger of being seen, or the sanctuary of invisibility.