“Profoundly unique and honest...somehow executed with an astonishing lack of ego. Hagood will break your heart with her naked sincerity; a masterful, singular writer who sheds light with every page.”
—MARY-LOUISE PARKER
GOBLIN MODE: A SPECULATIVE MEMOIR
Forthcoming September 2, 2025 from Santa Fe Writers Project, shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award
In Caroline Hagood’s Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir, the protagonist, who is and is not Caroline Hagood, takes a surreal odyssey through humor, horror, and plague-time Brooklyn. In a supercharged three-day stretch, she navigates a city full of flashers and parrots who talk to her on subways, makes an ominous visit to a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo, Puerto Rico at Christmastime, mothers two spirited children in an apartment that’s probably haunted, and lives in a world that may or may not be about to shut down. This state of goblin mode that she inhabits is metaphorical, said to have taken root since Covid and all the other sociopolitical unrest. But it’s also very real, in the form of an actual goblin that has been following her around since childhood, daring her to live more fiercely...
Forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press in January 2025
Caroline Hagood takes the reader on a wild ride, using surreal stories to process the recent death of her father. She mourns by making language work as a time machine to go back and let her father live again, bending space and time to make a place for him, if only in this book that is, above all, a séance. Death and Other Speculative Fictions is for anyone who is grieving the loss of a loved one and searching everywhere for answers.
“Caroline Hagood's vibrant, surprising prose poems speculate on the nature of human connection and loss with astonishing, understated force."
—Idra Novey
“In the aftermath of her father’s death, Caroline Hagood turns to a steady diet of speculative fiction for solace. In this haunting sequence of prose poem meditations, she draws on sources as rich as Charles Yu, Kurt Vonnegut, Madeleine L’Engle, and filmmaker George Miller to construct an alternate mythology to help process her grief. One is gripped by the vulnerability, the raw tenderness of her voice, yet at the same time inspired by its provocations. Hagood shows how the speculative imagination, rather than a mode of escape, is a powerful tool for understanding the real–even rewriting it. “It’s by way of the fabrications, the coming at it from outlandish angles…that we can really see how things are here on earth and how they need to change.” This book charts the road between life and death with furious creativity and vision.”
—Elaine Equi
“Death and Other Speculative Fictions is a gorgeous tribute, a survival diary, a love letter, an ode to a father, to speculative fiction, to time, and to life. It cobbles together from real and imaginary places and the thresholds in between, a means to think about the unthinkable, and to go on with the impossible and beautiful task of living in a world that is both flooding and on fire, while letting go of those we love most, and eventually ourselves. It is full of grief, wonder, awe, hope and love. I was so moved, and my world was expanded by this book. Like Furiosa’s mechanical arm, it is a thing of beauty, born out of loss, pain and necessity.”
—Ananda Lima
“In this beautiful and devastating essay in poems, Caroline Hagood’s voice is fully alive, witty, searching and razor-sharp. What is so unique about this book is how she balances vivid descriptions of 21st century life with searing questions about the relationship between grief and speculative fiction. By reminding the reader how strange everyday life has become and how quotidian science fiction can feel, she reinvigorates hybrid writing, bringing a new liveliness and incision to the genre. An instant classic.”
—Joanna Fuhrman
“Have you looked into the eye of death lately? If you are not ready to do so, no worries, Caroline Hagood has done it for you. In Hagood’s new collection, DEATH AND OTHER SPECULATIVE FICTIONS: An Essay in Prose Poems, you will find a hauntingly thorough scanning on what it means to lose a parent in a 21st Century vernacular that engages Furiosa, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade Runner 2049, and Kurt Vonnegut. For all that we might know, medically and scientifically, about what happens to our bodies when we die, Hagood wants to know more about the plane where death has no meaning and she means to find it. In this new work, Hagood becomes “a student of time, space, creativity and sorrow” so that we may get a glimpse of the beyond.”
—Jiwon Choi
“In the third section, “Death as Furiosa,” set after her dad’s death, Hagood takes a broader look at the world around her, including wars abroad, neighborhood violence, and online vitriol. Throughout, she incorporates philosophy, literature, pop culture, and SF references—from Cicero and Ray Bradbury to Blade Runner and the Star Wars saga’s Yoda—into her wide-ranging examinations…Hagood’s observations on the parallels between writing and mourning are particularly astute in lines such as “all writers are mediums, talking daily with the deceased, resurrecting, bringing back ghost truths from the underworld.” Her prose poems are equally creative in their descriptions, such as one of New York City as “a dead cement isle” where “commuters step over people sleeping on the subway platform like they were plastic bags.”
—Kirkus Reviews
FILTHY CREATION
Praise for Filthy Creation (2023, Mad Hat Press)
In Filthy Creation, Dylan makes sense of her world through art. Her house is a graveyard of inspiring auto parts her mechanic father has dragged home, her family’s ongoing Frankenstein diorama, and Dylan’s own mishmash of assemblage projects that she sets on fire whenever they don’t meet her standards. Dylan and Shay fall in artsy, gothy, queer love even as Dylan is figuring out that her dead Dad—whose ghost has been visiting her even though she doesn’t believe in such things—was not in fact her biological father, but who was? As Dylan tries to find out, and find herself as an artist, she gets sucked into the world of visiting art teacher, Simon Ambrogio—learning to box and to embrace the more violent side of creativity, and running away from her secret-keeping mother. But she has raw and passionate artwork, and shouldn’t that be enough? Filthy Creation asks what it means to be a girl maker. How do girls fit into the false dichotomy between brilliant, monstrous men artists and supposedly domesticated women ones? And how can a young artist even figure out her own identity amid all this noise?
“Compelling and absorbing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Perfect Feminist Fiction.”
—Pop Matters
“It’s a shame Mary Shelley isn’t around to offer a blurb for this tender, luminous portrait of the art monster as a modern teen. FILTHY CREATION has so much to say about art, gender, loss, and broken dreams. It’s also a triumphant coming-of-age page-turner whose young heroine grabs your heart from the first page and never lets go.”
—James Tate Hill, author of Blind Man’s Bluff
“If, as the poet Rilke noted, beauty is the beginning of a terror we are only just able to bear, Caroline Hagood's novel FILTHY CREATION shows us how to bear it. Continuing the investigation into monsters, misfits and trauma that she launched with her brilliant book-length essay, WEIRD GIRLS: WRITING THE ART MONSTER, Hagood brings Dr. Frankenstein and his creation together in the form of a visionary young woman named Dylan who is one-third pyromaniac, one third-Picasso, and one-third Poirot. To follow Dylan through this book is to follow one's own dreams, to befriend one's most troubling and beloved ghosts.”
–Sharon Mesmer, author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place
“What splendid strangeness is this? Love story, loss story, weird and wild escapade, artistic quest…all of these and such fun. Caroline Hagood’s FILTHY CREATION explores the peaks and pits that come with making art (and growing up), through the experiences of the singularly awesome narrator, Dylan. “This was the only way I knew how to love something,” this irrepressible character confesses, “by wanting to taste every part of it, and this was too much. I was too much,” and oh, how I loved her too-muchness and this novel’s so-muchness. Profound, poignant, ferocious, hilarious. A glorious romp.”
–Melissa Ostrom, author of Unleaving
”Hagood’s FILTHY CREATION is a brutal yet beautiful coming of age novel about what it’s like to lose a parent, while at the same time finding out who you are as an artist.”
–Erika Wurth, author of White Horse
"Hagood expertly captures what it is like to be young, when the world is a series of doors just waiting to be opened."
—Electric Literature, “15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Summer”
It’s worth stating from the outset that the title of Caroline Hagood’s novel Filthy Creation comes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — and that this novel has no small amount of bizarre science present in its pages as well. Hagood here tells the story of a young woman finding her voice as an artist. Also, there are ghosts. What’s not to like?
—Tor.com, “Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for May and June 2023”
“Hagood, a poet-essayist-novelist-professor, writes with the kind of reckless-yet-careful style you want from an art monster…This is youth-in-revolt, art-monster style. And I devoured it with the hunger of an art monster, naturally.”
—Cristina Baptista
WEIRD GIRLS
Praise for Filthy Creation (2022, Spuyten Duyvil Press)
A combination of memoir, cultural critique, and manifesto, WEIRD GIRLS traces the art monster—the writer, often coded monstrous and male, single-mindedly dedicated to the work—from ancient myth to modern literature and pop culture to ask: what happens when the art monster is a woman and/or mother? And what’s the connection between creativity and monstrosity? Told in brief, thought-provoking, often darkly humorous chapters, WEIRD GIRLS offers a groundbreaking take on art, motherhood, and of course the art monster.
"Beguiling…Hagood’s skillful construction, astute observations, and candid personal confessions will draw readers in....This one packs a punch."
—Publishers Weekly
“When I finished reading it, I resolved to buy a dozen copies and hand them out to all the women who keep me feeling powerful and supported whenever my faith or energy has wavered. Then I thought I’d send it to a few book clubs to get it a wider audience, but eventually, I thought I’d like to buy a hundred copies and donate one to every public library within a 100-mile radius of my house to ensure that the next generation of women growing up all around me will have easy access to this necessary little lighthouse with its bloody but unbowed heart of feminist grotesquerie.”
—Pop Matters
“I immediately began recommending this book to my female friends who are writers and artists, particularly those that have children. Hagood is turning things upside down here and rescripting the age-old, cliched narrative of the madwoman in the attic. She’s drawing on her life, her childhood reading and watching, her creative writing, and her literary, cultural criticism backgrounds to create a fluid hybrid form to inspire female creators out of the labyrinths of artistic self-doubt, in order to embrace the art monster inside them. It’s a cool and fearless journey, one which had me writing down titles for future bookstore visits and thinking about new blended ways to approach creative nonfiction writing and cultural criticism.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“We begin to hear our own hearts beat louder, as with joy and anticipation we welcome another great art monster to the world.”
—PANK
“Caroline Hagood’s Weird Girls is part manifesto, part homage, and part long-form essay—a tribute and a call to arms for women artists and particularly mothers to embrace what Jenny Offill calls “the art monster” in her novel, The Department of Speculation. Drawing on the monsters of her own childhood and an impressive archive of women writers, comedians, and essay theory, Hagood encourages us to embrace our inner monsters so that we can create the monstrous, specific, grotesque, witchy, and embodied work that the world so desperately needs. Her interludes on her own mothering and monstrosity are especially moving and thrilling. In this time of forced birth, right-wing religious grabs for the autonomy of marginalized people, and late capitalism, this book is a much-needed balm and call-to-arms for all of us to be our full selves.”
—Carley Moore, author of The Not Wives and Panpoclaypse
“Caroline Hagood’s decision to embrace her ‘inner monster’ and lead a writer’s life spurs her epic literary journey exploring the figure of the so-called 'weird' woman: the witch, the mother, the feminist. Hagood’s text spills gloriously from topic to topic, weaving together a hybrid narrative that rejects both genre and the idea that the mother and art monster cannot co-exist. Bold, smart, and wildly endearing, Weird Girls is a must-read for women who feel like the world can't contain them—and for those who love them.”
—Patricia Grisafi, author of Breaking Down Plath
“In Weird Girls, Caroline Hagood assembles the ultimate dream dinner party: a pantheon of brilliant, iconic, genre-defying, and game-changing women artists through time and across discipline. In sharp and spirited prose, Hagood discusses the lives and work of these artists as a means to interrogate gendered ideas of creative genius. Using elements of memoir, manifesto, and attentive close reading, Weird Girls is rich with insights that, in their jewel-like shimmering, light the path for discoveries of our own.”
—Mary-Kim Arnold, author of Litany for the Long Moment and The Fish & the Dove
GHOSTS OF AMERICA
Praise for Ghosts of America (2021, Hanging Loose Press)
GHOSTS OF AMERICA came out on October 15, 2021 from Hanging Loose Press, which has published books from such writers as Maggie Nelson, Eula Biss, Cathy Park Hong, and Ha Jin, among others.
In GHOSTS OF AMERICA, on one unforgettable night, a sexist male novelist undergoes a peculiar transformation after being haunted by the ghosts of the women he has miswritten: Jackie Kennedy and Valerie Solanas.
Mary-Louise Parker calls Hagood’s work “profoundly unique and honest…somehow executed with an astonishing lack of ego. She will break your heart with her naked sincerity; a masterful, singular writer who sheds light with every page,” and Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait with Boy, declares the novel a "rollicking feminist fantasy...irreverent, well-informed, dirty and smart, this novel is an absolute party."
“Explosive…a fast and funny revisionist satire” that “throws off plenty of nitro along the way.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Hagood ably plays ventriloquist to Jackie and Valerie, narrating each of the characters, in turn, with elegant, elegiac monologues.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Told with wry humor, historical accuracy, honesty, and breathtaking imagery, it is also a testament to the power of writing to resist and revive the erased voices of history’s women.”
—The Nervous Breakdown
“"This book is not only a literary work, but an act of revision and restoration. Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel reframes the ghosts of America as women, true heroes alongside valorized men, and rewrites the consistent wrongs of the canon. In short, through almost fragmented chapters, Hagood’s quirky story takes a gander at redemption– for the canon, for women, for America."
—PANK Magazine
“Then there are the ghosts of women that America as a culture and nation have made to feel disenfranchised, alienated from their bodies and dispossessed of their minds (such gendered haunting can be seen in the recent Texas law on abortion); and this is where Caroline Hagood shines, where she does her reckoning.”
—Cultural Daily
WAYS OF LOOKING AT A WOMAN
Praise for Ways of Looking at a Woman (2019, Hanging Loose Press)
In Ways of Looking at a Woman, a book-length essay that interweaves memoir with film and literary history, Hagood assumes the role of detective to ask, what is a “woman,” “mother,” and “writer”? By turns smart, funny, and poignant, Ways of Looking at a Woman is a profound meditation on the many mysterious layers that make up both a book and a person.
“Caroline Hagood’s Ways of Looking at a Woman is a profoundly unique and honest piece of work, somehow executed with an astonishing lack of ego. She will break your heart with her naked sincerity; a masterful, singular writer who sheds light with every page.”
—Mary-Louise Parker
“This book is for the poetry lovers whose brains have gone fractured after childbirth, fractured by love and focus and television and books, every influence jostling for precious space. Is this a poem? Is it a memoir? Is it a book on art and motherhood and love? Yes. I’ll shelve it next to Maggie Nelson, on the shelf marked Necessary.”
—Emma Straub
“Caroline Hagood's critical eye is somehow both cool and passionate, and she uses it freely, beautifully, to gift readers a riveting portrait of a mind at work. Referencing high and low culture, family, academic syllabi, and most importantly, her body, Hagood has made something entirely new and all her own.”
—Elisa Albert
"Her well-developed, imagery-laden prose makes the book an enjoyable read, and the essays' brevity makes them suitable for bingeing, if desired. Thoughtful, literary-minded musings on motherhood, art, and the frequent intersection of the two."
—Kirkus Reviews (Recommended Book)
"The insistence of the personal as the poetic politic is reminiscent of Second Wave feminist, Betty Friedan's seminal text The Feminine Mystique, only reimagined for the Instagram generation...This book--which defies genres and makes readers question how they see themselves and the women in their lives--explodes the code of so-called women's work. But it does so with lyricism and kitschy allusions, a most convincing way to argue a point and spark a revolution."
—The Brooklyn Rail
”Ways of Looking at a Woman is a smart, honest, funny, and endearing lyric portrait of the artist as a fragmented and reconstituted entity.”
—Pank Magazine
“Hagood’s Ways of Looking at a Woman is strikingly honest, comforting, and it’s a thousand things at once—but that is exactly it— so are women, so are writers, and so are mothers. If there is any perfect way to capture an experience with a single unique perspective, this may be it. Ways of Looking at a Woman is a vital read for everyone—it teaches, it explains, and it can make you feel at home.”
—JMWW Journal
MAKING MAXINE’S BABY
Praise for Making Maxine’s Baby (2015, Hanging Loose Press)
“A brave and innovative poetic exploration of the grotesque yet mystical universe of Maxine.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Tracking her flight from the hell of feeling, Caroline Hagood's metaphors unfold with a desperado's inventiveness. Reeling with the book's unexpected turns, I'm reminded of Dickinson's razor-sharp observations of her own psyche and of Plath's acerbic wit. For all the diversity of its escape routes, Making Maxine's Baby reads like a single utterance. It wills us to train our attention not on the traumatic violation at the poems' source, but on the loneliness, wild creativity, and valor of survival.”
—Joan Larkin
“In Maxine, Caroline Hagood has created a supremely likeable character. Hagood carries us through her life, beginning with sexual abuse and culminating with a pregnancy. That Maxine lives off the grid, as a homeless New Yorker, may make the challenges Hagood has set herself-embodying otherness and trauma-seem insurmountable, but this poet ismore than up to the task. There is no patronizing in Hagood's smart, empathetic poems. Making Maxine's Baby is a gorgeous book, eminently readable, full of surprises.”
—Elisabeth Frost
“Author Caroline Hagood's newest book, Making Maxine's Baby (out next month from Hanging Loose Press) is a literary hybrid that reads like poetry but arcs like a novel. The postmodern Inferno is told from the perspective of Maxine, a once privileged New Yorker who gives up modern life to make a home underground in the subway tunnels and mates with Marvin, a homeless man who wears one trash bag shoe and one golden clog. Hagood packs her latest work with references for readers to parse apart, from Medusa to Leatherface, exploring the use of ultra-violence in art.”
—Vice Magazine
“This is a daring book, an odyssey written from within the consciousness of Maxine, a resident of New York City subway tunnels and survivor of repeated sexual abuse from the age of six. A notable achievement of this collection is Hagood’s ability to keep the reader steadily engaged with the mind of Maxine and her tortured drive toward freedom. This is a deeply-imagined, credible character who awakens the sympathy of readers as well as admiration for the cool tone and highly poetic language of her creator.”
—Editions Bibliotekos
LUNATIC SPEAKS
Praise for Lunatic Speaks (2012, FutureCycle Press)
"Who the lunatic is, however, remains a little bit unclear, because Hagood's book consists of order, insight, introspection, and some really good lines. No doubt the book is surreal, but like dream interpretation, the actual meaning of her words becomes apparent with analysis.”
—Gretchen Hodgin, JMWW
"An intelligence that practically makes the page vibrate; A love of words and a choreographer’s understanding of how they dance upon the page; An eye for the details of our common experience that leaves nothing unquestioned or unseen; And a sense of HUMOR! I know! So rare! And this isn’t light verse; there are no rhyming tricks, no stand-up shows. The laugh-out-loud moments in “Lunatic Speaks” NEVER make the poems feel slight- instead make them reach deeper."
—Hansel Castro, Manhattan Chronicles
"Her poems will by turns tug at your heart and make you laugh at loud. An engaging and nuanced little collection, Lunatic Speaks is magnetic and relatable, a great volume to tuck in your bag and read as the subway rattles past each station. The poems will absorb you and help speed you toward your destination."
—Lauren C. Navarro, Editions Bibliotekos
"[R]eveals a good deal about Caroline Hagood’s poetic gifts & her poetics: visceral, not reluctant to turn savage, wishing to hurl the most disparate aspects of her experience into a vortex in order to re-shape them, even if it means mangling."
—John Hayes, Robert Frost's Banjo
ANTHOLOGIZED WORK:
36 NEW YORK POETS
(Shinchosha, 2022)
This book features the groundbreaking work of a new generation of New York Poets, including Jack Agüeros, Sherman Alexie, Eula Biss, Mary Bonina, Donna Brook, Jayne Cortez, Martín Espada, Edward Field, Joanna Fuhrman, Diana Goetsch, Caroline Hagood, Kimiko Hahn, Robert Hershon, Cathy Park Hong, Emmett Jarrett, Hettie Jones, Joan Larkin, Natasha Le Bel, Gary Lenhart, Kathryn Levy, Dick Lourie, Morton Marcus, Pablo Medina, D. Nurkse, Mark Pawlak, Harvey Shapiro, Elizabeth Swados, Virginia R. Terris, Tony Towle, Paul Violi, David Wagoner, Terence Winch, Yolanda Wisher, David Walton Wright, Bill Zavatsky, and Larry Zirlin.
EMBODIED (A WAVE BLUE WORLD, 2021)
Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology
Edited by Wendy and Tyler Chin-Tanner
Poems by: Kenzie Allen, Ruth Awad, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Wendy Chin-Tanner, Kendra DeColo, Shira Dentz, Carolina Ebeid, Jenn Givhan, Caroline Hagood, Laura Hinton, JP Howard, Omotara James, Virginia Konchan, Miller Oberman, Khadijah Queen, Maggie Smith, Diane Suess, Sokunthary Svay, Venus Thrash, Paul Tran, Vanessa Villarreal, Khaty Xiong.
Art by: Weshoyot Alvitre, Lesley Atlansky, Ned Barnett, Morgan Beem, Carola Borelli, Rio Burton, Mia Casesa, Gab Contreras, Marika Cresta, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Ronnie Garcia, Jen Hickman, Liana Kangas, Miss Lasko-Gross, Soo Lee, Jessica Lynn, Takeia Marie, Hazel Newlevant, Emily Pearson, Kaylee Rowena, Y. Sanders, Ayşegül Sınav, Stelladia, Jude Vignants, Ashley A. Woods, Sara Wooley
Letters by Cardinal Rae and Saida Temofonte
Cover by Claudia Ianniciello
Mystical, rooted, painful, joyous, and ecstatic; visions of the body, our genders, and our very identities from across the spectrum of contemporary poetry come together in this monumental intersectional feminist anthology where verse and comics unite in spectacular new ways.
Beautifully illustrated and bracingly written, Embodied is a memorable collaboration between cis female, trans, and non-binary poets and comics artists showcasing the power of both forms in a stunningly unique keepsake volume that will be treasured for ages.