4 Femme Fatale Collections to Read If You Love Lana Del Rey
Fans of Lana Del Rey typically love not only her sensuous and transportive music but also what it represents—a bygone and nostalgic Old Hollywood glamour. Del Rey creates this atmosphere in her songs, which often blend Americana, alt-pop, and soul sounds, letting listeners in on soaring and melancholic California scenes. This year, the Grammy-nominated singer is set to release her 10th album, The Right Person Will Stay. If you can’t stop listening to Lana, we recommend these poetry collections that channel her equally dreamy and dark aesthetic.
Romance or the End by Elaine Kahn
The role of narrative and storytelling is palpable in Lana Del Rey’s music, in which she often casts herself as a persona. Del Rey’s music seeks to answer some of the biggest and most ambiguous questions—the roles of love and loss, and the tolls they take on the self, among others—and give them extremely high stakes, like the danger and mortality at the crux of “Happiness is a butterfly.” Romance or the End, as its title suggests, considers similarly big themes with equal intensity, using well-known literary arcs to tell its central stories. “Everything is a story. Even the truth,” Khan writes in the titular poem, “There is nothing truer in this world than the lie of love.”
The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Just as Lana Del Rey’s music travels through old hotels, swimming pools, and country clubs, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart embodies classic American settings, like drive-in movie theaters and jazz clubs, observing them like archives to see what’s changed and what’s left behind. These poems, which exude a clear sense of place and occasionally experiment with persona, focus on iconographic small-town America and a fraying sense of the American dream, a theme across Lana Del Rey albums like Born to Die, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, and Chemtrails over the Country Club.
Gloss by Rebecca Hazelton
Lana Del Rey plays with the institutions and archetypes at the heart of her music’s stories, bringing up questions of gender, power, and social norms. Rebecca Hazelton does the same in her collection Gloss— – looking beyond the glossy surface the title suggests to delve into hidden, often troubling intricacies and dynamics. She focuses on popular fantasies, most specifically movies and marriage, to reveal how life can feel like a script on multiple levels. In doing so, she turns artifice on its head, like Lana Del Rey’s honest lyricism.
Sweet Movie by Alisha Dietzman
“What gives us the right to someone else’s body?” Alisha Dietzman asks in Sweet Movie, selected as a National Poetry Series winner by Victoria Chang. Lana Del Rey asks a similar question on songs like “Ultraviolence,” “Blue Banisters,” and “How to disappear,” among others. Both Del Rey and Dietzman explore the gender dynamics of suffering, consider what’s real and what’s presentation, and allude to religious mythology.
Looking for more poetry and music pairings? Celebrate Lana’s feature on “Snow on the Beach” with our poetry pairings for Taylor Swift’s Midnights album.
