What if the lady -- Jane Austen's contemporary --who conceived the world's most intriguing modern monster (Doc Frankenstein's creature) -- was also a proto-suffragette, precursor-feminist, and, simultaneously, much to her chagrin, wedded to a narcissist poet, whose liberalism urged on his libertinism? How would such a woman think? What would she say about her majuscule Romantic dilemma and miniscule romantic predicament? Such are the questions that Chad Norman pursues in his act (and art) of sympathetic re-animation: Squall: Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley.
I have rested on
the bosom of a man
the sea consoled
as if it were the wife
he forgot
in the centre of his final wish.