Your Best Asset Is A White Lace Dress

The poems in Your Best Asset is a White Lace Dress roam the gaps between the artificial forms of the dressed and the wilderness of the animal self. They are charged with lyric energy, strung along a wire of fierce, meaningful weirdness. They compel with inventive images, precise timing, and their twin surprise gifts—humor and fear. “There is a creature in my garden,” writes MacBain-Stephens, and we lean forward to hear if it’s a badger growing from a woman’s shoulder, cockroaches attending a tea party, or a Ghost Fairy, whose “dead static wanders through colonial walls like gossip, explodes into mailbox dandelions and mint aromas.” Whatever comes next, it will haunt these poems sing, provoke, and linger. —Sally Rose Kindred, author of No Eden, and Book of Asters