What Does Anyone Know About Goddesses?
Hestia runs a finger along spines:
Making a Home; and Domestic Duties, or,
Instructions to young married ladies; and this
one, The Young Housewife’s Counsellor and Friend.
No one would guess she values such compiled advice.
They think she was disgorged complete
with knowledge of how to create and keep,
an innate wisdom of the art, the science, of domesticity.
It serves their narrative to think she never
craves anything else, content to stay
home, mistress of neat, dame of orderly.
She’s agoraphobic, they whisper,
shy, a homebody. It’s no wonder
she never married. It’s just as well.
And if she were married and mortal,
they would say, it’s a woman’s place,
women by nature like their nests.
She hears them, and smiles to herself,
will not let anger rise within. Let them
think what they will. It matters not to her.
She sits keeper of the secret—that all good
homemakers build nests they thrill
to come home to after roaming alone
the dark wilds on moonlit nights.
Reviews
“Like all great literature, this collection gives us a fresh, romantic lens for the parts of life we might mistake as ordinary. Through keen observation and delicate, intentional language, Malone blurs the lines between ancient and contemporary, legend, and reality. She brings the goddesses into our world and also us into theirs, exploring the power and isolation of womanhood, our shared loneliness and immense strength, and the simultaneous entrapment and liberation of domesticity. This collection comes at a time when women want something for themselves—and these poems are by, for, and about us.”
- Emma Castleberry, Editor, Hulsey Media
“Gina Malone’s first collection celebrates in exquisite, heartfelt language the multiple roles and nuances of women’s experience, personal yet universal; specific imagery yet elusive and evocative revelations honor the spirit of Hestia, least noticed of the Olympians, most needed, least rebellious, most resilient, quietly honoring the myriad activities of women’s lives.”
- Celia Miles, Author of Eight Nights at the Harris Hotel
“Reading this chapbook felt like entering a sacred circle—one lit by steady hands, ancestral fire, and the quiet magic of the feminine—the awakened goddess in her holy power and place.
Gina’s poems are living devotionals—offered to the mother, the maker, the keeper of soul and space. Each one, a prayer, a remembrance, a reclamation. They speak to something ancient and intrinsic in us: the knowing of how to create and preserve, the reverence for home as sanctuary—‘a conservatory for love and peace.’”
- Marga Fripp, Co-Founder/Executive Director of The Pollinators Foundation