Girlhood is Something Fierce and Bruising in “I’ll Take My Body To Go” https://ift.tt/8jloPFi
In her new collection, I’ll Take My Body to Go, Kindall Fredericks takes us on a journey. It is a bodily journey, starting with the relentlessly physical body of a 13-year-old girl — the wisdom and spirituality she achieves will come through that body while it scrapes, twists, snaps, and splits. She will shimmer, “gleam like wine on a parishioner’s lips,” get bruised, and grow. Fredericks, not pretending this story is wholly new, lets us know that Persephone and Demeter went through something similar. But as James Baldwin has told us, stories must sometimes be told again and again — “it’s the only light we have in all this darkness.”
This girl is not alone. She has connections with a friend named Amelia, one named Josie, a mother, a father, and ultimately a daughter. And while that cast of characters is small and unexceptional, they are accompanied by familiar names: the Kansas City Chiefs, Monica Lewinsky, the Bee Gees, Judy Blume, and the Russian educational theorist Lev Vygotsky all make appearances in these poems. Fiona Apple and Fiona the Hippo are also brought along.
The journey begins in light. Glorying in young crushes, these girls “Tangle our bodies/ around the collective letter to Ryan the silver legs/ of the desk are as cool as peeled fruit against our skin.” They are beautiful, and feel untouchable — broken bones and divorced parents are simply opportunities to support each other, to “crack open and glisten.” They live with a bravery and urgency that is palpable to the reader: “we hurled our bodies into the dark rank/ water of the lake how we gleamed and rattled blindly/ toward the bottom like nickels in a purse.” Their moving together as a group would please Vygotsky, who promoted social theories of growth and learning, while the tone of persistence echoes the symbolism of Fiona, the baby hippo who survived her mother’s death.
This courage and urgency are carried into adolescence. Their hips sway as they sneak wine in their purses and kiss each other beneath a “hickeyed sun.” But these adolescent experiences are less innocent, less easily squealed away. They bring loneliness and alienation, new kinds of bruising. Boys tell them they are ugly, reduce them to body parts. A young woman gets raped, a mother dies of cancer. “How quickly you learned you could hurt your body with another body.” There is drug abuse and sins “crawling/ across your body like fleas, feathered feet rippling through your clothes.” Choices seem limited, you can overdose in a Payless, find Jesus, or marry a guy who offers only tighter limits. They swallow their tongues, quietly, they stop eating, they are medicated by doctors who offer prescriptions and dealers who trade product for swimming lessons.
Adulthood is signalled by pregnancy and brings new obligations (“I hope you plan to breast feed”), but in some sense they remain “always 13/ and playing tennis.” Ultimately, the narrative returns us to that pre-teen confidence, as if motherhood brings one back in time, and memory renews the cycle of female strength. This new baby, “lilying against her fine skin,” will have a full life. “The only glass ceiling we’d know’s in the greenhouse / where Madison socked Kyle for calling her Fattison.” In the end life is about possibility, a daughter is like a treasure map revealing “stars / scattered like dice.”
Fredericks’ narrative is never as chronological or coherent as I have made it seem. She works through bursts of imagery rather than straightforward narrative. I’ll Take My Body To Go is built of wildly free verse, using a variety of poetic structures — including both prose and dialogue — and never settles on any pattern of line breaks, letting the scansion be as unpredictable as the life it portrays.
The power of the volume lies not in its mastery of form but in the wildly vivid language — her voice has as much life and energy as the character it sets out to describe. Virtually every line has an arresting word choice or image, and there are numerous usages I have never seen before. To give a sense of style, take a look at her choice of verbs. We see things get “cufflinked,” “dandilocked,” “nostriled,” “brandied,” and “pennied.” We encounter “lilying,” “purpling,” “sparrowing,” “bellying,” and “wasping.” Time “mispronounces itself.” The narrator “ivies” back into her body. These words are used to convey activities that are familiar, in some cases ordinary. Her characters play tennis, giggle, kiss, marry, and live lives that are not materially different from mine or yours, but are rendered in language that makes these lives glow with color that is not just vivid, but fervent.
Fredericks has built a portrait of a feminist approach to heroism, not the lone ranger of male fantasy, but a heroine as part of a family and community, surviving as much as succeeding, and doing it through dogged persistence in the face of challenges and across generations. The adventures of growing up related here are not distinct and separate from our world. They are the world we can create with our thoughts and feelings and, especially, with our bodies.
POETRY I’ll Take My Body To Go
By Kindall Fredericks
University of Akron Press
Published April 7, 2026
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