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.

                                                                Always grateful for the inspiration,

                                                                Barbara Sabol

                                                                                          

What I'm Reading Now: Library of Small Happiness by Leslie Ullman

Upon Finding the Muse between 186 Pages of Essays and Exercises:

Striking the Flint with Leslie Ullman

  ISBN: 978-0997201123

https://3taospress.com/authors/leslie-ullman/

Nearly a decade ago, in the midst of my favorite pastime (lollygagging on the Internet exploring Deep Image poetry), I happened upon an article by the poet Leslie Ullman. Why, I wondered, had I not known about this poet before now?  A quick search led to my immediate purchase of her 1998 publication, Slow Work through Sand followed by her three other books of poetry Natural Histories, Dreams by No One’s Daughter, and Progress on the Subject of Immensity.

I began what would become a gapped but enriching e-mail correspondence with Ullman over the next nine years and when “Library of Small Happiness” was released in 2017, its wide, creative net led to pages of annotations and margin notes spurring me into a new journal of my own writing.

The book itself is divided into two parts. Part I consists of seven essays on poets, poetry, and craft, and Part II contains a series of poetry writing exercises (which I soon found could be applied to any genre), notes on revision, and a brief section of references. I wondered; however, why the Preface, titled, “The Essay that Failed,” had not been included in the table of contents because it was there that I had to start taking notes – had to pull books from my shelves and answer Ullman’s question, “What is happening to me through [the poem]?” The preface and this initial question set the tone for the reader’s shift in perspective: both the Library of Small Happiness and the poem are interactive entities. Ullman emphasizes this on page 13 when she writes, “This book… [is a] collaboration between imagination and the written word.”

Upon reading the first essay, “A ‘Dark Star’ Passes Through It,” I noted that Ullman does not position herself as the authority on craft and writing but rather a journeywoman. Instead, she acknowledges the theories and strategies of her own teachers, favorite writers and artists, and mentors. This holds true for the entirety of the book. I was a bit dubious at first; Ullman, a prolific writer, served as Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Texas-El Paso, currently teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is a manuscript consultant. Why not take a more commanding stance?

The answer revealed itself with almost every annotation – what she values most are relationships and shared insights with both poetry and people. The following journal entry from my own notes provides an early summary: “[Ullman] concedes she is not (does not claim) she is unearthing new discoveries in terms of critical theory regarding reader experience, but not since Oliver’s Rules for the Dance have I held a stack of poems to the light of a craft book, and not since swooning over Hugo’s The Triggering Town have I so eagerly carved out blocks of time to write…Her holistic rubric provides the how of explication. Energy explication.”

As one moves through the remaining essays, it is easy to settle into the author’s rhythm of theory and example. In fact, the abundance of craft-centered theories and explanations followed by examples from authors such as Kenyon, Gilbert, Stafford, and Levertov (among many others) is precisely what makes Library of Small Happiness a book which mentors as it educates.  In the essay, “The ‘Personal’ Poem as Sacred Space,” the reader gets the sense that Ullman is on the poet’s side as a matter of principle. It is also here that she segues from the poem’s landscape (my margin note read “…the internal grip of awe”) to the poet’s internal landscape. On page 65 Ullman writes, “The work I’m about to discuss…renders intensely personal insights…by means of an unspoken, redeeming humility, a willingness simply to bear witness and settle into a certain degree of irresolution rather than a need to clarify for conclude.” The author understands the poet’s mantra – the world contains and evokes wonder, and Library of Small Happiness celebrates all who remain open.

As much as we sometimes wish it so, the poet does not exist in a vacuum. Ullman celebrates this, too, as she calls upon artists, psychologists, and mathematicians to assist in our journey throughout the creative process.  Each essay, for me, was an open but cupped palm where one could either burrow in the fleshy promises surrounding the heart and life lines and write about that experience or drop anchor and follow the author’s Venn Diagram of interconnected discourse between the disciplines. 

Library offers five sections of writing exercises that address (among other strategies) inversion, tension, persona, borrowing lines, juxtaposition, and reconciliation with the self. 

You’re going to want to grab a new journal. Another new journal. As I worked my way through the exercises, I encountered the sensation I can only describe as what one must feel when a ghost or energy from another dimension is occupying the exact same spot one is currently occupying. Except in this case, I was both the three dimensional writer and the other-worldly energy. Perhaps this is because Library of Small Happiness had me writing long before I reached Part II.

Yours with pen in hand,

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp