Dog Woman by Melinda Freudenberger coming soon for purchase!
Synopsis
After a night out, BABY encounters Dog Woman, a version of herself who resembles a dog. BABY resents what Dog Woman represents–all that she would rather repress–while Dog Woman must now contend with a body she didn’t ask for. Together, as they learn to live under the same roof, they re-imagine time, fall in love, and irritate the wound.
Praise for Dog Woman
Dog Woman catapults the reader into a world of brutality and strange tenderness. Against the backdrop of sexual violence, the speaker’s body births/creates/rids itself of its living monstrosity—and as their relationship expands, the poems interrogate the limits and possibilities of survival in its rawest form. Bold, experimental forms and innovative language break Dog Woman free of trope and expectation, pushing into a forest of jagged myth and blood-soaked truth.
—Jessica L. Walsh, author, Blowdown and Book of Gods and Grudges
“Pull—don’t look away,” directs Freudenberger in the opening pages of DOG WOMAN. And we follow these instructions—because how could we look away from a woman splitting open, giving birth to a separate animal self? In language and images at times strange and grotesque, the author pulls us through these pages, into the fractured experience of sexual abuse, its effects on body and mind, and finding a path back to wholeness. Formally inventive and interesting—blending prose poem and story with tightly crafted textual play and visual experimentation—this collection deftly employs multiple voices to plunge readers into a lived experience of abuse from multiple angles. But this collection goes even further—it becomes a search for god in and out of the body and an examination of the way time loops around our human experiences. It is an incisive and visceral portrait of the trauma of abuse and the resulting detachment of body from mind and memory, but also the equal and opposite trauma of an attempt to re-attach, to find and remake a full self through time. In the midst of this trauma, though, there is also tenderness and deep devotion—but only if we refuse to look away.
—Andrea L. Hackbarth, author of waveforms: a short course in piano tuning
One of the most gripping collections you will read in 2026, Dog Woman explores what it means to be “a body yanked” by violence. This collection unabashedly threads the lyrical, ethereal, and guttural elements of a woman in the aftermath of assault. In their masterful world-building, Freudenberger brings the reader into a realm of a woman whose body “is an island she is stranded on,” searching for agency and sense-making with the help of various characters including Dog Woman. Every page brings surprise in story, form, and language. Freudenberger’s deft command of threading narrative and the lyric results in a collection that is startling, masterful, and daring. This complex book is one you will want on your bookshelf and one that deserves many repeat visits.
—Katie Richards, author of Apple Mind
Dog Woman is a dream, a nightmare, a mindscape, a phantasmagoria of desire and abjection, self-loathing and forgetting, wound and need. It’s the story of a self splitting and trying to come to terms with hunger and devotion. A tour de force of hybrid story-telling, Dog Woman swings between prose and poetry with expert rhythm, resulting in a propulsive read—I read it in one fell swoop. “Don’t look away,” Freudenberger says, and you can’t.
—Dana Levin, author of NOW DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE (Copper Canyon, 2022)
Melinda Freudenberger graduated from The New School with their MFA in Poetry in 2020. Their work has appeared most recently in Anomaly, Always Crashing magazine, and Spectra Poets. They live in Brooklyn, NY with their cat, Amy.