Micheline Maylor’s The Bad Wife is an intimate, first-hand account of how to ruin a marriage. This is a story of divorce, love, and what should have been, told in a brave and unflinching voice. Pulling the reader into a startling web of sensuality, guilt, resentment, and pleasure, this collection asks: what if you set off a bomb in your own house? What if you lose love and destroy everything you ever knew? These poems have a disarming immediacy, full of surprising imagery, dark humour, and the bold thoughts of a vibrant and flawed protagonist. Balancing a need for wildness and the space to dwell, The Bad Wife explores the taut confines of those vivid, earthly pleasures that we all know and sometimes can’t escape. I forgot the oath: Do no harm. -from “Yesterday, I Went to the Market”

By turns quirky, startling, earthy, and hope-filled, Micheline Maylor's poems slip effortlessly through topics ranging from what we give up as we age to regrets for love that has passed, the interplay between the animal world and human thought, and the myths we append to ourselves and others. An expansive, conversational voice underscores the poet's technical mastery as her subjects turn from love to hope to fearlessness. Maylor asks readers to perceive how we inhabit our selves, how words construct us. Little Wildheart is rich with challenge and surprise. I check the box on the government forms: Caucasian. No box for colonized, for the 1/16th bred. Just the double helix of my DNA, my ability to sun-brown, and my own green-eyed children of the voyageur, river visions still caught in their irises. We're born out of a long ago season. Everyone is sure of place and race. Blood and semen mixed in dirt and cervix, convex and enchanted by muskrat's eerie smile, dark truth furred and matted, stroked by a river paddle. Let that long tooth bite now in the land of the race riots, negro, and redskin, the underground railroad, and the Indian village. Let the name Pontiac take new form and hit the road, the righteous mile where judgement and boundary blurs, especially on matters of composition blood, bone, and relations. -from "Detroit Zoo bathroom 1977"