Girls & Women
by Chella Courington
Burning River Press
http://burningriver.info/?page_id=994
2011, $6.00

Chella Courington's Girls & Women is one of those rare collections that I really like, even though it was inspired by a writer I can't stand (Virginia Woolf, who Courington praises in the book's introduction). It also makes an impressive showing out of a personally/sexually frank prose poetry form that is too often ignored or burdened with angst. Not to say that there isn't angst here, but it feels earned.

Girls & Women is primarily about the female body, which is observed in third person as "the body" throughout, and how it interacts with religion, politics, family, and its immediate environment. The tone shifts from playful to mocking to sad observance tinged with shame, but it's ultimately sympathetic. A lesser writer would barge through on the momentum of causeless anger, or endlessly pat him/herself on the back for how revolutionary and fearless they're being, but Courington's voice uses the body as a critical lens through which anything that touches it is examined. In so doing, she wants a deeper understanding of this body, this loathsome and self-destructive and lovably human thing.

The chapbook's apex (to me, anyway) is "The Bell Rang & They Were Erased," in which the narrator's personal relationship with Joni Mitchell's lyrics is contrasted with the dry, sterile process of high school English sentence diagramming. In the latter, words are like "people on a wire—mostly solitary figures dangling on a string," with no hint of "who they would become when their tongues uncurled and their hearts split." And indeed, modern education in this country does little to instill passion or curiosity in anyone. What works here is Courington's subtle structure—she sets up Joni Mitchell as Point A and sentence diagrams as Point B and allows the reader to raise the question of how those points could ever possibly connect. Which, of course, is the poem's central question. She does this throughout her chapbook, but this poem is the best example of it.

I should also mention "Frames of Mind" for the line "eyes have the upper hand though attached to the body's shoulder," because it reminded me of the Blackadder quote about how if you give someone an inch, they'll take a foot, and then you won't have a leg to stand on. I doubt that was the intention, but here we are.

Finally, as a guy whose sense of design is slowly improving, I'm very impressed by the look of Girls & Women. The cover is eye-catching, not too indie, and consistent with the feel of the content, and David McNamara of Sunnyoutside did a great job with the layout—this chapbook is, visually speaking, far beyond what I'm used to seeing. It looks like it should be taken seriously, which is good, because it should be.—Dave Kiefaber