In "Dorothy Day's Daughter, Pregnant with Her Ninth Child, Begs Her Mother for Charity: A Bedtime Prayer," " the speaker confesses: The strongest poems in the collection are those in which the speakers address a specific, rather than a generalized audience the poems addressed to other women are especially powerful because they allow their speakers to exist apart from the famous men in many of these women's lives. They also are well aware of their own complicity and guilt while several of Baggott's subjects have entered the historical record as victims, the women in these poems do not see themselves as such. Both poems highlight one of Baggott's strengths the women in her poems speak with irony and humor as well as with anger or resentment. McKinley values the "comfort" she derives from her seizures and the opportunity to escape her husband's-and the public's-expectations of proper behavior, which extend even as far as diagnosis-fainting spells are deemed more appropriate for a First Lady than epileptic seizures. (Do not look at me with your round eyes.) The newspapers will call it a fainting spellīut this rugged habit is fit for cowboys. In "Ida Saxton McKinley, the First Lady, Seizes during a Dinner Party," the speaker describes epilepsy as both "stored grief released / violently into the air" and "a secret pleasure." Explaining her illness to her husband, she notes: We are not real-that's why there were no footprints in the dust: We float Arguing her innocence, Lizzie Borden uses these conventions to her advantage, reminding the jurors:
Whether the speakers in these poems are angry, grieving, desperate, or resigned, they all are armed with eloquence and insight into the circumstances that have shaped their lives, including societal expectations of feminine behavior.
Each poem situates its speaker in a particular historical moment: Lizzie Borden addresses the male jury at her murder trial Mary Rockwell contemplates her son's fencing injury Camille Claudel speaks from her studio and from the mental asylum where she was a patient. Julianna Baggott's second volume of poetry, the 2006 Editor's Choice winner from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, is written in the voices of women ranging from Mary Todd Lincoln to Monica Lewinsky.
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