Too Like the Lightning Prose Poems to My Almost Loves

Author Teresa Spencer "hollas back" with darts disguised as kisses.

Taffety Punk Theatre Company returns to antagonizing the patriarchy with the publication of company member Teresa Spencer's Too Like the Lightning: Prose Poems to My Almost Loves. This riot grrrl's first published book is, appropriately, a riot. This comic, pro-lady-rage collection is a series of love poems to catcallers, followers home, online trolls, and other sundry unsavory types. Spencer began to pen these delights, framed as "missed connections", to share with friends in solidarity over the utter nuisance of street harassment. The collection grew, she took requests, and ultimately her home theatre company commissioned her for more.

Flipping the power dynamic between target and harasser, each poem in Too Like the Lightning is a bitingly funny takedown of the harasser's gaslight: "I was just paying you a compliment." So what if it were a compliment? Too Like the Lightning imagines love stories whose first sparks are those too-brief missed connections on the street.

Spencer has been collecting true stories of harassment of women in public spaces for close to a decade and turning them into hyper romantic odes to pervs. Spencer says, "Street harassment exists, in a very real way, on the same spectrum of behaviors as sexual violence. The harasser knows what he's doing: he's not hitting on her, he's exercising control. He's putting her in her place in public. These poems flip that script: the joke's on him."