Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

The Lifting Dress by Lauren Berry   
Penguin, 2011. $16

Review by Leigh Rastivo

Lauren Berry’s The Lifting Dress confines itself. There is essentially only one narrator throughout, that of the first poem “The Just-Bled Girl Refuses to Speak,” and she is obsessed with her own adolescence. The primal components of puberty — burgeoning sexuality and shifting kinship bonds — comprise the sparse thematic landscape. The setting, though apt for the humid subject, is also limited: these poems are all happening in subtropical Tallahassee. So if you seek an expansive collection that muses on a wide range of human experiences in many places, move on. But if you crave sharp-edged lyricism and a dive into a reality that is both dangerous and ordinary — stop right now and read The Lifting Dress.

When a poet doesn’t go wide, she had better dig deep — and that is exactly what Berry does. The Ann Sexton epigraph: “I am mad the way all young girls are mad,/with an offering, an offering…” supplies a frame that requires the excavation: the idea of a common feminine zeal. According to the Sexton quote, all young girls are wildly excited with a sexual gift, elevated to the level of religious ceremony by the connotation and repetition of the word “offering.” (They may also be deranged or angry — depending on which definition of “mad” is privileged.) Thus, Berry initiates the collection with the idea that sexual ferocity is both common and sacred.

Immediately after, Berry starts the dig. The first poem is a rape poem — or more specifically, a poem about the narrator’s reaction to rape: “The entire red carnation in my mouth.” Reaction is always the focus. It is never a question of whether the girl will be hurt or will hurt others: the point is the honesty of her reaction to it. This honesty is anchored in vivid literal images like that red carnation: colorful, layered — vaginal.

The Just-Bled Girl “[slips] /the red carnation further into [her] throat,” silencing herself with the symbol of her sex. She does not claim that anyone forced the carnation into her throat. She herself “slips” it there. She might be hurt, certainly, but she is also actively defining herself: “I’m just the kind/who has trouble parting her lips.” With the qualifier “just,” and “lips” as constituents of both mouth and sexual organ, the girl nonchalantly reconstructs her body, taking charge of new the connections.

The reader is therefore not completely surprised when the next poem “Notes on How to Love a Boy” asserts the girl’s own aggression — her camaraderie with the wasps that attack boys who venture into her yard: “I wanted stingers instead of leg hair.” Yes —
the quarry is also a hunter. There are references to oral sex in the banally titled “Be a Good Girl, Don’t Tell” (“how soon I would lift/ my head from a man’s ink-stained hips”); and there is talk of the inner animal encouraged in “Seventh Grade Science in the Partially Burned Classroom” (“In wolf, in wolf, in wolf.”). But for any woman who has been in the world, raw sexual treachery, whether initiated by male or female, does not surprise. While beautifully wrought, the overt talk of his and her lust is no new treasure unearthed.

The real freshness here resides in the uneasy truths spoken about kin. In “The Bitter Orange Theater” poem, the girl talks of her mother’s “preordered coffin” and overtly wishes for another mother to “hunt” her, “Discover [her]” and “take [her] home.” In “Big Sister Drinks in the Field Behind the Children’s Hospital,” the girl grapples with the dual possibility of being savior or poison to a sister passed-out drunk on peach liqueur: “Is it true, my heart could be/the wet peach that sugars/her lips?”; and she ultimately admits that her familial love is selfish and needy: “If there is a heaven/ I’m not letting you go.”

Most disturbing and remote — and therefore intriguing — are the father poems. While the references to the girl’s passion are relatively easy to analyze, the talk about fathers is not as accessible. In “My Father Takes Me Into the Backyard So I Can Become a Woman,” father acts as priest, leading the ritual that turns the girl into a swampy, sexual body of water: “With my father’s permission, my hips swell.” Is this just an idea? Is there some deed indicated?

Then in “The Year My Father Mistook the Ocean for a Mistress,” the girl’s mother is gone. She has “limped off … in her paper hospital gown” and the girl is jealous of her father’s affair with the water, or presumably a woman represented by water, assumed from the earlier illustrations of the girl herself as a feminine body of water. In the related “The Year My Mother and I Mistook The Pool for a Father,” the pool is likened to “a clean-shaven man” and the girl talks about how it appears capable of reciprocal affection: “Like it could kiss back. Why else would it ask/my mother and me to undress?” But according to the title, the pool that requests nudity of both mother and daughter is a father figure, misidentified or not. So whose father is this? The girl leaves us with her own questions at the end of the poem: “Who were we all those nights?/Who were we talking about?”

These questions (and the other questions that appear in 80 percent of the poems) indicate some unfathomable mystery. Unfathomable or not, Berry is clearly concerned with the mingling of the sexuality of fathers (and father figures) and daughters. This topic travels beyond the epigraph’s promise to dig deep. This is the subterranean territory of human experience, the usually unspeakable, and the girl brings the reader down to it, with talk about how oral sex reminds her of her father’s girlfriend and his wet bar’s polished “…glasses that read, / Name Your Poison” (“Be a Good Girl, Don’t Tell”). These are uncomfortable associations, but they ring true as intimate utterances.

Berry’s triumph is not in her tale of sexual transcendence. The gold is in the story of negotiating sex as someone’s former little girl. The poem “From Inside the Ice Cream Parlor I,” one of the few with a point of view other than the girl’s, concludes: “How silly. Men kissing/other men’s daughters.” But, in the end, this is an unnerving fact of love and sex , and it is also the deep, narrow, compelling heart of The Lifting Dress.