‘Untamed grief often turns feral, runs wild’: Poems that reimagine histories and feminine agency

In Jennifer Robertson’s debut poetry collection Folie à deux, reimagined histories and feminine agency take centre-stage through a subversion of the traditional authorial “I” and a reclamation of the female muse as a central creative force. These poems resist the literary tradition of women as silent inspirations, instead granting them voice, desire, and agency. By dissolving the singular self into a polyphony of language, memory, and myth, Robertson allows figures like Marthe Bonnard, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and Mary Magdalene to step out of the frame and speak – not as muses, but as creators. Through synaesthetic textures and cinematic mise-en-page, Folie à deux becomes an act of aesthetic resistance and imaginative reclamation.

The Rückenfigur

Almost a decade has gone by and she’s still standing there: one part restraint, three parts mystery; the nape of her neck lit up, exposing the otherwise subdued blue and grey surroundings. Your eyes now vicariously touch her shoulder. She is perhaps reading a letter, it’s hard to tell, with her hands and face invisible. She prefers eccentric railings over grand, majestic façades, choosing to be shrouded in the shadows, someone who likes the frayed fringes of things: trellises, trespassers and troubadours.

She’s a Hammershøi enigma, a lexiphile, a connoisseur of words: archaic, arcane, invented. You send...

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