The List of Last Tries, by Jessica Walsh

“For unpleasant women, that we may be our own village”
— the dedication in The List of Last Tries

Jessica Walsh’s The List of Last Tries is a miracle of focus, a sustained gothic nursery rhyme that describes a girl’s coming of age and coming into power, for which she is shunned and exiled as freak, witch, and murderer. She “split(s) worms lengthwise,” “pop(s) open cow eyes,” and even eats a bug in defiance of the conventional shrieks of other girls. Her mother “sav(es) grocery money for slipcovers” but our girl is an unmaskable stain, a paper doll with a beating heart fed to the shredder. Later, when she is “a woman without people” in another town, she makes her living “as professional hag”—“I oracle,” she writes—and tends the border between wild and tame. The List of Last Tries is a captivating female picaresque, each poem taking a step deeper into marginality’s fierce power. When Walsh’s speaker breaks the spine of Poems for Every Occasion and, finding nothing to help her there, burns it, she does what witches do—she concocts her own volume of myths and enchantments. The result is the book that you are holding in your hands.

—Diane Seuss, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Four- Legged Girl, Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Unapologetic, unrepentant, wild-as-weeds and willing to swallow any bitter insect on a dare, to eat whatever crawls beneath her fingernails, Jessica Walsh’s girl-turned-woman speaker is refreshingly “impassable feral,” and her List sings her ballad, a battle cry, a fable for our times. And at its center is a woman who doesn’t seek redemption, won’t apologize for her unsmiling, her letting the stray neighborhood cats “waste to wormy street cat weight,” won’t pull the weeds, “will not respond to reason,” and refuses to play along to any “meter man” the town may send with “all his broken sentences.” In a time where the literary world condemns our unlikable characters and politicians tell us to get our coat hangers ready, Walsh responds with a powerful girl/woman indeed: “a woman / deadly/alone / ready to announce herself / all she has been called: / freak  witch  murderer  curse.” The startling, haunting, and empowering world of Walsh’s collection is “like holding a paper doll / against a sun-cut window / seeing a tiny heart beating / and feeding it all to a shredder”—dark and engaging, this collection upholds storytelling as the ultimate truth, and even then, a woman can withhold as a sign of her own strength, as Walsh well knows: “I wanted little: to tell a story / and keep parts of it to myself.

–Jenn Givhan, Landscape with Headless Mama, Girl with Death Mask

Walsh’s The List of Last Tries embodies the uncanny seamlessly, unnervingly, and with delightful swagger. The body anchoring these poems is defiantly female; the speaker is feminine on her own enraged, macabre, fearless terms. She amplifies her awkwardness, anxiety, interpersonal missteps, abandonment, and solitude in order to weaponize them against anyone who would stand too close for the wrong reasons. This is a consciousness that offers unwavering scrutiny through the dissection of animal organs; who determinedly cultivates species of invasive weeds, while a tenacious sense of inertia builds into something like power; and who pauses to note, pleasantly, how half-melted dairy enhances the chilling indulgence of consuming a recently-beating heart. This book opens again and again like an unlit doorway in front of you, and the presence floating inside dares you to walk through it. Walk through it. 

—Fox Frazier-Foley, The Hyrdromantic Histories and Like Ash in the Air After Something Has Burned