Jennifer Robertson’s poems in Folie à deux give voice and desire to women often remembered through their association with art, history, or myth. The Scroll.in excerpt published September 12, 2025, includes poems centered on Marthe Bonnard, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and Mary Magdalene, where visual culture and personal feeling meet. [Scroll.in]
What the excerpt includes
The excerpt is drawn from Robertson’s poetry collection Folie à deux, published by Paperwall Publishing. It brings together four poems: “The Rückenfigur,” “Klimt’s Adele Dusts the Gold Off Her Alabaster Skin,” “Mary Magdalene Touches a Gazelle,” and “Août,” introduced as “After Marthe Bonnard.”
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The poems move among art, film, color, myth, memory, and touch. Their shared perspective shifts attention away from women as silent figures in someone else’s story and toward women who speak, desire, remember, and act. Marthe Bonnard, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and Mary Magdalene are the excerpt’s named subjects, though the poems’ references reach beyond those figures.
How grief becomes a body in “Mary Magdalene Touches a Gazelle”
The title phrase comes from Robertson’s poem “Mary Magdalene Touches a Gazelle”: “Untamed grief often turns feral, runs wild. Becomes a gazelle.” The transformation is poetic imagery, not a clinical description of grief. It gives sorrow a living, animal form and connects the poem’s emotional movement to touch and the natural world.
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How the poems reconsider women associated with art and history
Robertson’s framing recasts familiar women not simply as muses or objects of observation, but as subjects with their own interior lives. In the poem named for Adele Bloch-Bauer, the image of dusting gold from skin suggests a figure emerging from the surface and symbolism attached to her. “Août,” meanwhile, is explicitly introduced as being after Marthe Bonnard, placing a historical woman at the center of the poem rather than leaving her in the margins of another person’s story.
This approach also appears in earlier Robertson poems published in The Bombay Literary Magazine in April 2022. In an editor’s note, Pervin Saket described the poems as belonging to women traditionally assigned passive roles in creation, calling them “creators, speakers, doers.” The magazine’s note refers to the poet as Jennifer Sigler-Robertson, while its byline uses Jennifer Robertson; that difference alone does not establish a biographical name change. [The Bombay Literary Magazine]
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Where the excerpt fits in Folie à deux
A January 18, 2026, review by Aditya Shiledar describes Folie à deux as Robertson’s debut collection, arranged in five sections: “The Latch-Key Girl,” “Because We Spoke Like Bees Do,” “To Kiss Like Caravaggio,” “The Final Finding of the Sea,” and “The Locus Amoenus.” Shiledar discusses the collection’s interplay of personal history, art, literature, and memory, and points to poems or references connected with figures such as Mrs Dalloway, Emily Dickinson, Clara Schumann, and Sappho. Those are the reviewer’s interpretations of the wider book, rather than claims made by the excerpt itself. [Scroll.in]
Readers who want to continue beyond the excerpt can look for Folie à deux by Jennifer Robertson, the collection from which it is taken. Paperwall Publishing is credited in the excerpt; format and current availability depend on the listing and market.
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