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250 pages, Paperback
First published September 6, 2017
Nasty is a complicated word. Prior to its infamous use in one of the 2016 Presidential debates, the word made me think of something mean, often an animal, as in: “Watch out! That dog has a nasty temper.” Nasty has a connotation of toothiness, snarling, a long and flexible neck: a nasty-tempered dog is dangerous even when leashed. It is a mouth word, not a paw word. Even more frequently, though, I hear nasty used as a sort of verbal hazmat label to quarantine whatever causes revulsion, as in the phrase “What’s that nasty smell?” Things described as nasty often have to do with the human body: its odors, its whispered-about functions. The word also has an aura of sex, especially sexual kink. Whenever I hear the word, I think of the scene in the Muriel Spark novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie where a policewoman questions the young girl Jenny about a witnessed sex crime, asking, “Did you see something nasty?”, and Jenny and her friend Sandy later debate whether the officer, who had a Scottish accent, said “nasty” or “nesty.” Because of Spark’s novel, I mentally picture a bird’s nest whenever I hear the word nasty: woven twigs, maternal shelter. If two young girls in a novel playing with vowels can cause such a revolution in how I hear the word nasty, I am hopeful that an anthology full of woman poets can cause an even bigger revolution. After all, there is only a short distance between revulsion and revolt.