“A rich, moving work of mythmaking and autobiography, a child’s explanation tales of the complex and confounding adults who disrupt and punctuate her life with their unpredictable, inexplicable actions. Rottenberg, a gifted storyteller, reveals the vortex that is childhood with a fierce intelligence and, most of all, tenderness. This poetic sequence is a delight!” --Eric Pankey, Poet
Every childhood perhaps has its enchantresses and its ghosts—the ones who hold our imaginations and the ones who vanish. The Enchantress Queen and The Ghost Who Made Me is one girl's story of both, a mother and father who have been mythologized to tell the all-too-American story of a life created and lived in the changing norms of the late 20th century.
The book centers on a girl whose accidental conception irrevocably alters the life trajectories of her teenaged parents and who witnesses her parents’ inevitable divorce, her family’s subsequent fall into poverty, and her mother’s struggle to find a new partner in the disco era and cope with her life trauma and mental health issues.
The girl comes of age amid these challenges and ultimately makes peace with the imperfect people who loved her.
Written as an interconnected sequence of poems, The Enchantress Queen and The Ghost Who Made Me uses the compression and precision of poetry to render what prose cannot—the interior life of a child making sense of the adults and world around her.
Livingston Press, 2026
ISBN 13: 978-1-60489-423-3
ISBN 10/ASIN: 1-60489-423-7
130 pages
$19.95
The book centers on a girl whose accidental conception irrevocably alters the life trajectories of her teenaged parents and who witnesses her parents’ inevitable divorce, her family’s subsequent fall into poverty, and her mother’s struggle to find a new partner in the disco era and cope with her life trauma and mental health issues.
The girl comes of age amid these challenges and ultimately makes peace with the imperfect people who loved her.
Written as an interconnected sequence of poems, The Enchantress Queen and The Ghost Who Made Me uses the compression and precision of poetry to render what prose cannot—the interior life of a child making sense of the adults and world around her.
Livingston Press, 2026
ISBN 13: 978-1-60489-423-3
ISBN 10/ASIN: 1-60489-423-7
130 pages
$19.95