Wasp Queen

From the Los Angeles Review's review of Wasp Queen:
It’ s easy to allow Claudia Cortese’ s Wasp Queen to transport readers to the dark corners of physically-abused, possibly-schizophrenic heroine Lucy. . . “ I kill cheerleaders, bitch,” Lucy smoothly terrorizes a rival during an anonymous phone call. She commands a boy to give her hickeys, and she fantasizes about her mother’ s death in a plane crash. But despite this strange behavior, Lucy is a hero for our age: bold, flawed, furious, and able to hold her own in a world that hates her.
Wasp Queen centers on body image. While the neighborhood girls call our heroine, “ Lucy Fat Face, Ugly, Stupid, Miss Lardy Lard,” Lucy replies that her tormentors are “ . . . the skin // of drums I bang // to break.” Lucy’ s selfies are snapped “ amid Oreos, chocolate ice cream, / last slice of pizza in the box.” . . . At least a third of the collection’ s poems address the danger of being seen, or the sanctuary of invisibility.