What Girls Learn

"Circling what is and is not home," the girls and women in Anne Dyer Stuart's chapbook of poems, What Girls Learn, lead lives of damage, struggle, and self-formation. "There is a girl at the window of the burned house," says one poem. "Girls' ruin lies in others' hands" says another. This poet is not inclined to let it lie. She narrates a life in the body, "with its bright optimism and its slow decay"; she tells stories of pleasures and terrors, the indelicate paradox of "wanting to be wanted, to disappear, to blaze up/like a prom dress thrown on a campfire." Even the old metaphors sound new in Stuart's hands: a sixteen year old girl asked a trick question is "mute as cheese." Summer is described as "a slow dream turning/away, rotting on the sills . . . but you will take her anyway/all the bruises mush inside your mouth/all the sweet juice sticky on your chin." What Girls Learn is an accurate, painstaking, and tender exploration of girlhood and growing up into a woman who still holds the unspoiled girl she was: "Inside: sleek, unblemished./Inside: the same you God/ stitched together-hastily, in Heaven, / then threw down like a stone."

-Lisa Williams, winner of the Rome Prize in Literature and author of The Gazelle in the House, Woman Reading to the Sea (Barnard Women Poets Prize), and The Hammered Dulcimer (May Swenson Poetry Award)