Further Authentic Stories of Half-Ladies by Isabel Cristina Legarda – NWVS #195

$22.99

Paper, Color

979-8-89990-690-9

2026

This title will be released on Sept. 25, 2026

New Women’s Voices Series, No. 195

At once provocative, transgressive, and elegiac, Further Authentic Stories of Half-Ladies dares to examine the embodied experience of women and girls who have been put on display—Sarah Baartman, Julia Pastrana, Afong Moy, Eugenia Martinez Vallejo, and ballet students at the Paris Opera of the 1880s. Among collages and poems voicing their lived experience are other poems that contemplate the body itself—its components, its vulnerability, the study of its inner workings, and its meaning. By intimately connecting outer world realities of systemic injustice, exploitation, and cruelty with deep inner realities of trauma and resilience, this collection resists injustice, protests erasure, and vividly brings to life the longings, desires, fears, and endurance of women whose stories must not be forgotten. #poetry #women #trauma #resilience

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Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there. She is currently a practicing physician in Massachusetts. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines. She is the author of two other poetry chapbooks, Beyond the Galleons (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2024) and The Pillar Dwellers’ Handbook (Seven Kitchens Press, 2026). Her fiction has appeared in Last Syllable, Cleaver, Ruminate, and others. She can be found online on Instagram (@poetintheOR) and at www.ilegarda.com.

PRAISE:

Isabel Legarda‘s Further Authentic Stories of Half-Ladies is more than a collection of poems and collages. It’s both a full-throated roar and an intricate reclamation of the flesh and voices of actual women who, throughout history, have been objectified and demonized, put on display and dissected. Legarda puts her words in the hurting places, refusing the silencing of history and politics.

–Philip Metres, author of Dispatches from the Land of Erasure, and other books

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Bodies look back at the reader from the pages of this chapbook, where they lie and have been opened like books on dissecting tables. We find them in online sources of specimens, inside cages where they are paraded as freaks, and on carnival posters where they bristle with hair and the weight of their spectacular difference. Spectacular, sharing the same root as spectator and speculum— for it is with both a poet’s eye and a doctor’s discernment that Isabel Legarda queries the punishing obsessions with beauty and the desires that have ransacked bodies throughout history.

–Luisa A. Igloria, author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Prize, Black Lawrence Press , 2024)

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In Further Authentic Stories of Half-Ladies, Isabel Legarda uses the language of dissection to explore bodies, especially to examine the many ways the world mistreats the most vulnerable bodies. While these poems look closely at some horrifying realities for women, children, and animals, Legarda pushes past despair and wields naming and storytelling as the powerful instruments they are: “I hear you in my ear,” one speaker says, “unbind your story.”

–Katie Manning, author of Hereverent and Tasty Other

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