The Lifting Dress
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Selected for the National Poetry Series by Terrance Hayes.
Lauren Berry's bracing and emotionally charged first collection of poetry delivers visions of a gothic South that Flannery O'Connor would recognize. Set in a feverish swamp town in Florida, The Lifting Dress enters the life of a teenage girl the day after she has been raped. She refuses to tell anyone what has happened, and moves silently toward adulthood in a community that offers beauty but denies apology. Through lyric narratives, readers watch her shift between mirroring and rejecting the anxious swelter of her world, until she ultimately embraces it with the same violent affection once tendered to her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Berry's sometimes gripping debut, almost every page explores the danger, the allure, the violation, and the omnipresence of sex, in a society in this case, the coastal Deep South and in the life of a teenager, "The Just-Bled Girl," who is stuck in an abusive relationship (rape seems to be a component) with an adult she calls "Big Man." These characters and others without names the mother, the father, a party-girl big sister recur through first-person poems that weave the girl's story into provocative declarations about desire in general, about the paradoxical, vulnerable, alluring, liminal figures of female adolescence, about its countless double binds: "I watched a girl/ wake inside me/ with a throat like a hallway// where rich folks are introduced." Entering putatively adult spaces, given over to sex, the girl is a victim but an explorer, too: "Leaning on the car's trunk, I push against/ the places I'm never allowed into// and the perfume burns off my dress." Meanwhile the older generation simmers, or festers, or sets traps for the young: "Though I believe everyone has a mother,/ I don't know where mine went," Berry's girl opines, in a poem with the remarkable title "The Year My Father Mistook the Ocean for a Mistress." Some readers will likely find this debut too narrow; others especially those who admire Sharon Olds will see in its stylized dramas not only passion and sorrow but an irreplaceable truth.
