Vivid Emotional Texture in “Lo” https://ift.tt/4Y1G5nc
Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Lo is a richly rendered and often emotionally brutal collection of poems from Melissa Crowe. She came from a rural background that shaped her character, and her recollections of it are always powerful.
In several of her poems, Crowe describes the nature she observed as a child as a broken, twisted setting for an unsafe childhood. Her surroundings consisted of weedy ditches, “truck-mad roads,” and poisonous berries. Night terrors and visions of bears tormented her sleep, and despite having a close-knit family, there were still dangerous undercurrents, particularly in the form of her drug-addicted brother.
Crowe’s vignettes of blue-collar life are blessedly free of nostalgia for the innocence of childhood and the imaginary simplicity of country life in poems like “I Want to Tell You What Poverty Gave Me.” The landscape of her childhood is an inescapable facet of her identity: “I’m a yard of junked cars, each / with its corona of broken glass / and never-mowed grass.” There are still glimpses of beauty amidst the rust, shame, and pain of her girlhood — her delight in decorative folding paper bells and quartz-lined rocks.
In the intriguingly titled “I’m Not Mad at My Mother for Letting Me Roam the Neighborhood Unsupervised,” Crowe writes that “Some days / she didn’t know where I was, which was okay except / when it wasn’t. I don’t know what thief stole my mother’s / past.” Her childhood is portrayed as considerably safer and brighter when “there were never any men just cousins / and dogs and rubber dolls and birdchatter.”
Crowe writes of being molested by a “friend’s father” with devastating brevity. She portrays the predatory old men of her childhood with a cool anger that Christina Rossetti, when writing of goblins, would have longed to be allowed to express: “Girls on skates who rolled / down the throat of that street… One says, these years / later, I knew better than to go there.”
Religion is often embedded in rural, poverty-stricken areas, and the title poem refers to a Bible camp and how Crowe was “saved” multiple times as a youth. “I’d be a King’s kid, goddammit, / confess enough times to finally make it stick.” In “Often in Dreams She Was My Girlfriend Until I Remembered, Still Asleep, That It Wasn’t Okay,” she reminisces about her crush on a teenage friend who she went to Orange Julius and The Gap with, who was a rare safe and intoxicating place in her life. This romance ends, as is still typically required in many rural communities. Crowe had to preserve herself.
Some of Crowe’s most memorable poems are her epithalamiums (poems celebrating marriage), which are sprinkled throughout the collection. Her poems about her husband are especially touching. “If I’m lucky, if I’m brave, we’ll keep / birthing an ending into ravening light.” Another loving dedication is “Poem Written after I Have Again Needlessly Hurt My Husband’s Feelings,” where she writes, “Through the window I can see / his broad back, a view I adore / above all others save his face.” A delightfully titled poem is “When We’re in Bed and You Take Out Your Mouth Guard, I Know It’s On.”
The collection is divided into sections with poems of varying length and subject; the strongest sections are predominantly about her childhood and marriage, which offer a wide range of emotional texture and vividly rendered interpersonal relationships. The weakest section is the last, which is chiefly about politics and quarantine and lacks the glimpses of the other players and personalities in Crowe’s life that enrich the rest of the collection. Overall, Lo is a revelatory glimpse into “the slings and arrows” of girlhood and womanhood.
And what about me? Girl to whom language
seemed an element so reactive it wanted only
my breath to ignite it, each word a sliver
of phosphorous I held in the dark of my mouth.
POETRY Lo: Poems
By Melissa Crowe
University of Iowa Press
Published May 2023
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