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1. What kind of atmosphere does Machado create with her epigrams?

There are two epigrams to Her Body and Other Parties: One from Jacqui Germain, which reads ‘My body is a haunted/house that I am lost in./There are no doors but there are knives/and a hundred windows.’The other, by Elisabeth Hewer, reads ‘god should had made girls lethal when he made monsters of men.’The effect of these epigrams, taken together, is ominous and presages violence, damage and the attempt to balance or compensate for the monstrosity not of humans generally, but of men.

2. What can the title of this book mean?

Her Body and Other Parties plays on a certain ambiguity in the word ‘parties,’ since it can mean festivities and also ‘member of a legal proceeding.’ Thus ‘her body’ could be ‘party to’ ‘her’ life, one of the claimants in a contentious proceeding. It could also mean a festivity, with the disturbing undertone that ‘her body’ being ‘a party’ might not necessarily be a party she would have fun at, the way kids will have parties when their parents are away. The face value, of course, is that her body is a source of fun, which survives the complex and dark echoes from the other associations

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