Full disclosure: I was given a free copy of this book from Poetic Book Tours in exchange for an honest review.
It’s been a few years since I read poetry for the website, but I always enjoy them. They take readers on a ride by bringing out universal truths in ways that they wouldn’t expect. Today’s subject, Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love by Regina Louise, does just that. It’s a good poetry collection that explores one woman’s journey to love herself again.
Edited by Kate Kilcup-Marsh, Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love explores self-love, healing, identity, and emotional truth through a mythopoetic lens. It blends memoir, poetic storytelling, and spiritual insight and invites readers into a deeply personal and universal journey of reclaiming one’s self after trauma, heartbreak, and abandonment. At its core, Unladylike is about love as a reclamation, authorship, and embodied truth. Through lyrical, unflinching poems, Regina Louise examines the ways women and survivors are taught to mold themselves to be chosen, and what it means to return to oneself instead. These poems move through themes of inner child healing, emotional resilience, codependency, desire, grief, and personal sovereignty, offering readers both reflection and recognition.
Structured as a poetic cartography of becoming, this collection traces the evolution from silence to voice, from self-abandonment to self-devotion. Each piece acts as an excavation site where memory, the body, and identity intersect—revealing how lived experience can be transformed into meaning, agency, and self-trust. With recurring imagery of lace, mirrors, altars, and the body as an archive, Unladylike creates a symbolic landscape that is both intimate and expansive.
Given its subject matter, this will be uncomfortable for some readers, yet that’s the point. The journey to self-healing is riddled with exploring truths that some might prefer to leave buried, but opening those up will be better in the long run. Louise does that with her story. She discusses how she was abandoned, institutionalized, and submitted herself to a man whom she realized didn’t love her. It can be tough to read about.
However, readers who are willing to go on this odyssey will be rewarded. Louise holds nothing back by exploring every second of her journey to self-love. She can be cryptic at times and blunt at others. Also, she offers commentary about her experiences as a black woman as black girls aren’t always provided the same comfort as white ones. Even if one doesn’t personally relate to everything that Louise went through, there is a lot to digest.
My favorite pieces in Unladylake are “Teeth Jewelry,” “An Ode to Butterfly McQueen,” “Recipe For a Child Marked ‘Other’,” “Autobiography of a Victim,” and “A Letter From Your Central Nervous System.” “Teeth Jewelry” is the prelude to the collection, and it sets up Louise’s conflict brilliantly. In it, she confronts her lover who is cheating on her. “An Ode to Butterfly McQueen” is about the author packing her bags and thinking about the abusive relationship she just left. Butterfly McQueen, best known for saying the line “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies” in Gone With the Wind, is evoked because at one point, Louise mentions that her ex-lover looks at her “half-hoping someone – anyone – might run after you / like they do in films: / Scarlett, Rhett, and Butterfly McQueen…”
“Recipe For a Child Marked ‘Other’” describes Louise’s time in an institution even though there was nothing wrong with her. It’s framed like cooking instructions, but instead of cooking up love, it was erasing it. It was heartbreaking. “Autobiography of a Victim” details a day of that kind of person, especially how they spent most of it apologizing, pleasing their abuser, and making themselves small. I knew how that felt. Finally, “A Letter From Your Central Nervous System” expresses sorrow of how they made Louise go into survival mode when she was young. However, her brain is also proud of her for letting that go. All of the framing devices used for the poems are amazing because they force the readers to look at the overall situation differently.
Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love by Regina Louise is a good poetry set about one woman’s trials and tribulations to self-love. It leaves no stone unturned, even if that means exploring the most uncomfortable parts of her past. More importantly, it reveals universal truths coming from a specific experience. I would recommend it to readers who love poetry and want to read about the journey to self-love. Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love is out now, so grab it wherever you get your books.
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