Unbecoming

What if women gained uncanny power at middle age? In Unbecoming, Cyn’s family is shattering, and she is at war with her own body. Then, when her best friend flies off on a mysterious faculty exchange program, a glamorous stranger takes her place—Fee Ellis, a Welsh poet who make it all look easy. But it may be costly to welcome this charismatic outsider to their little college town. Cyn’s best friend, meanwhile, communicates only in ominous fragments.

Lesley Wheeler is the author of The Receptionist and Other Tales, which was on the Tiptree Award Honor List, Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, Heathen, Voicing American Poetry, and other books. With Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, and others she coedited the anthology Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv. She maintains a blog on poetry’s possible worlds at lesleywheeler.org and is the Henry Fox Professor of English and Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.