A collection of love poems to street harassers, catcallers, followers home, pervs online, and other sundry unsavory types.
Too Like the Lightning: Prose Poems to My Almost Loves is the expanded and complete collection of Teresa Spencer’s satirical love poems to street harassers, alongside pinup-style illustrations by Sydney Schwindt. Among the poems are new short stories framing these problematic encounters with wry and piercing humor. In this collection of hilarious meet-cutes, the joke is on the jerks.
Taffety Punk Theatre Company returns to antagonizing the patriarchy as the publisher of this riot grrrl’s debut book. 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.
