THE GOLDILOCKS COMPLEX // TENEICE DURRANT
DELGADO

About the Author
Teneice Durrant Delgado was born in the hot and sultry center of Louisiana, but grew up in Northeast Ohio. She earned an MFA from Spalding University in 2006 and is currently finishing an MA in Literature at the University of Toledo. In a past life, she was a Argentine Tango Champion.

Praise for The Goldilocks Complex
When you read this collection make sure you are curled up in your favorite chair, with your favorite drink. In this sizzling collection Teneice Durrant Delgado pours oil and lights the flame that will have the reader wanting for more.  Like a warm blanket in a wintery morning, she invokes passion, desire and the naughty.  Beware the songs you listen to, because there might be a poet’s response that will linger in your head.
                          —Ricardo Nazario-Colon

Before she was recast as a sweet young girl, the figure of Goldilocks was in one version of the fairy tale an old hag and in another a vixen. The disclosure of this lineage highlights the female’s transgressive behavior in the orderly house of the bears, originally all males. The title poem of Teneice Durrant Delgado’s “The Goldilocks Complex” reminds us of this and points to the quandary of a woman in late adolescence on the verge of becoming an adult: how in the face of love and marriage does she resist capitulation to the woman’s fairy-tale role in the happily ever after? Juxtaposing Goldilocks and other fairy-tale characters with contemporary figures—among them a woman who plants a transformative kiss on the speaker’s lips, a drag queen, Shakira—Delgado craftily blurs boundaries to arrest time but ultimately returns us to a world where “[t]here are endings / more satisfying than / happily ever after,” where voices can still be heard to whisper, “Bailamos.”
                          —Debra Kang Dean