Fables for Our Times: For Girls Forged by Lightning: Prose and
other Poems, by Molly Fuller
By the numbers:
publisher: All Nations Press
P.O. Box 10821
Tallahassee, FL 32301
2017
ISBN: 978-0-9912721-1-2
74 pages
$18.00
(Review written by Barbara Sabol.)
To be taken
by surprise in the realm of literature is always a delight. In Girls Forged by Lightning, Molly Fuller's first
full-length collection, we are by turns charmed, intrigued, provoked, and,
poem-by-poem, surprised. Her territory here is the lyric fable, with a highly original
and contemporary twist. The element of surprise is woven into both the
creature-centric poems and a balance of
poems carrying a distinctly feminist sensibility, featuring women caught in
perilous or limiting circumstances.
In the first of three sections in the book, many
of the poems are populated by a unique bestiary: blackbirds, bears, bunnies, a
family of ants, and field mice with human qualities, who speak, shapeshift, and
scheme. The poems' titles, such as "The March Hares" and "The
Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies" are bright lures, leading the reader into
unexpectedly dark waters. A running theme of transformation is first enacted
here in the subversion of Goldilocks trope, in the mind-spinning poems,
"The Three Bears" and "Blue Bear," where bears become
humans become bears, and back. Girls grow from mulberry trees, change into horses, and are ridden to market in "Home Again, Home
Again."
Water
imagery and the figure of a drowning woman in "A Story about
Ophelia," the second poem in the book, establish a trope for women in distress
that flows through the next two sections. This compressed narrative establishes a critical tension between a woman's self-affirming and self-destructive
choices―a
tension enacted in a number of poems that follow. In the poem,
Ophelia, standing "knee-deep in the water" laughs. The poem's speaker
considers merging with the desperate Ophelia:
.
. . This laughter is a lovely sound. We all run to
hear it. We want to join her. But what if we all get
tangled in hair? What if she were to drown?
These
two questions lie at the heart of many of the relationship-based poems in the
latter sections: in "Cupcake" a figure called "Dollface"
"thinks about thick sturdy roots beneath the/fragile lily pad, thinks
about the writer's stong/hands. . ." In "Cherry Girl" ". .
.Husband pushes her head under/water. The surface goes black. . ." And in
startling and fresh language in the poem, "Girl Falling from the
Sky," the "girl" figure
.
. .plunges into iciness. It is unbearable
and joyful as her mouth clutches the water and her
arms break the surface. How she wants to breathe, to
breathe, breathe.
A unifying element that coheres the poems is the consistent prose structure
and a predominantly direct,
story-telling subject + verb + noun construction, which suits both the narrative
form and the fable model. The seemingly simple, straight-forward syntax also
entices us into an expectation of innocent enchantment
in poems about a "Magpie"
and "Blackbirds," as well as in those describing girls "falling
from the sky," those "forged by lightning." And enchanted one
becomes, even as narratives move into realms that disturb and at times alarm
our sensibilities.
An additional unifying feature throughout this
collection is an exploration of cruelty, whether emotional and/or physical. A certain violence
characterizes both the creature-based tales, exemplified by the
"massacre" of the "The March Hares," saddling and riding girls "to market to
see what price they will fetch." ("Home Again, Home Again,") and
in those poems digging into the heartless sex and abuse that can occur in
relationships ("Cherry Girl;" "Match"). The female figure in these poems does indeed merge with the drowning Ophelia, the woman nearly done in by love; but Fuller's figures endure, because of their self-affirming desire to breathe.
The weight of these starker poems is wonderfully
offset by those of transformation and a liberating self-awareness. In the poem,
"Tumbling Up," for example, the poem opens with a beautiful
declaration of self-preservation: "I promised myself that I wouldn't be
that girl again, a/tide waiting for a moon,. . ." The poem ends with an image of
transformation, as the speaker's legs, opening, transform "into butterfly
wings." In a truly electrifying image in the title poem, a girl, molested
and left "under an autumn oak," is literally transported out of her
horror:
She hears an electric sizzle, sees blind white. She
feels a quickening, then a lightening as she is
delivered beyond the tree roots, beyond the
mud,
and into a free-fall upwards past rain-soaked sky,
into clear blue, the tree-tops far below. She unlocks
her mouth, her hands. The stones fall to earth from
her open palms.
And offset again in a beautiful impulse toward a release to love in one of the book's few love poems, "Birth Year," where the speaker acknowledges a lover's softer aspects, concedes the goodness of a certain love. In the final stanza of the poem, a gentle imperative:
Realize we have the warmth of each other to hold in
both hands, skin yellowing by night light, both soft
as melting wax and the full moon settling in our laps.
The poet's feminist consciousness holds a mirror up to
society's perspective of women, contextualized in the kitchen or the bedroom, a
deserted field, who are designated for display "under glass," whose
attempts to communicate are forever misunderstood ("Hide & Seek), or one who awakens "without her
underwear. Sharpie note on/her thigh We
were here. . ." ("Lucky Girl.") This is a collection that
does not shirk love's unlovely
underbelly; its rough-honed edges dovetail into the current movement of women
pulling back the curtains that have long concealed exploitative and oppressive
behavior. Despite the dark tonality of many of individual poems in this collection, as a body of work, they represent a brave declaration of
self-worth, of identity, and of self-transformation. For the strength of the work in this book, in
addition to its topical relevancy, For
Girls Forged by Lightning is a timely and important collection of poems.
In the book's introduction, the poet points to the
fluid "boundaries between prose poetry, brief fiction and hybrid."
These poems represent a unique hybrid form: prose/poems as compact architecture
for contemporary fables and cautionary tales richly imaginative, often ominous,
always surprising, and brimming with fabulous possibilities for interpretation.
The lovely Molly
Fuller is the author of For Girls
Forged by Lightning: Prose & Other Poems (All Nations Press), two
chapbooks, The Neighborhood Psycho Dreams
of Love (Cutty Wren Press) and Tender
the Body (Spare Change Press). Her sequence Hold Your Breath was included in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (Marie
Alexander/White Pine Press). Her prose
poems and micro fictions have appeared in journals and anthologies including 94 Creations, 100 Word Story, Blue Earth
Review, Crack the Spine, Dressing Room Poetry Journal,Hot Metal
Bridge,Kestrel,MadHatLit,NANO Fiction, TheOklahoma Review,Potomac, Quickly, and
Union Station Magazine. She has been
recognized as a Finalist for the Key West Literary
Seminar Emerging Writer Award and as a Semi-Finalist for The Florida Review’s Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award. Fuller is also the co-editor of the
book Community Boundaries and Border
Crossings: Critical Essays on Ethnic Women Writers and co-editor at The Raymond Carver Review.She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is
currently a Teaching Fellow in the Literature program at Kent State
University.