Rita Mae Reese

press release: The Bubbler

Part fan fiction, part hagiography, part graphic poetry, The Book of Hulga wrestles with the long shadow of Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Catholic writer who wrote about roadside killers, racists, and wooden legs. The poems ask what use can be made of suffering and in what ways are we defined by absence, and they look to the same sources that O’Connor looked to for answers, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to the French philosopher Simone Weil.