My Wedding Dress by Heather Corbally Bryant

Heather Bryant weaves startlingly frank observations about the end of a marriage with rich and striking images that portend the loss—a blue glass perfume bottle, a print of an apple missing a slice, a half grown son’s infant anklet bracelet from the hospital nursery, oysters in Paris after a brief reconciliation—to create an alchemy of words, rich with anger, sadness, loss, and fury.

–Lynne Spigelmire Viti, JD, PhD, Senior lecturer in the Writing Program, Wellesley College

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

Heather Bryant’s My Wedding Dress shows us a marriage ripped to shreds, as a husband’s infidelity takes the wife by surprise — takes her over, takes her under – and love is reconstrued as lie. Bryant’s visceral anatomizing offers an exemplum for such trauma, and — still more significantly — for the realization that one can survive the staining, the fraying, the rending.

–Nathalie F. Anderson, Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature and Director of the Program in Creative Writing Swarthmore College

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]