The Garden Party (TriQuarterly Books 2027) studies the uneasy performance of class and femininity in the public sphere. It moves from the fabulist, imagined space of a prim dinner party through the rolling hills of Sussex to Trinidad in 1960 and back again, building a global perspective on what it means to come from, and love, a place despite its flaws. The collection is built from pantoums, ekphrastic contemplations, and unruly poems that riff off the language of the Bloomsbury group or sit in conversation with texts as varied as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, Freddie Mercury, Judy Chicago, Irving Berlin, and the plays of Sarah Kane.
“The Garden Party is a dreamy, moody book about art and desire and place and the past, full of wit and surprise and casual glamour, like a hedgerow tattoo, and a little bit of danger, like a paternoster lift. ‘I want to be that kind of marvelous,’ Arlett writes, ‘to know all the forces one can call spirit.’” —
— Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
Imagine a fête with the very best people: Sylvia Plath, Freddie Mercury, Virginia Woolf, Ada Lovelace, your grandmother. Imagine a trance arboretum, where sleeping “peacocks / dream like coats in the snow,” where “croquet bridges [are] sprung / like snares,” and you are a “rare sea creature in an evening gown,” who is learning how to love. The Garden Party is your invitation to fall down the rabbit hole and awaken anew, to fall back in love with the world you only thought you knew. Megan J. Arlett writes with a radical aliveness. I would follow her into any dimension, RSVP in hand.
— Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Erase Genesis
“Filled with delightful strangeness, Arlett’s poems show women as both desiring and desired, sometimes even hunted. These poems made me want to read them aloud and go write more of my own. This book is a gift.”
— Katie Manning, author of Hereverant
