Book Review

In the "Artist's Statement" that opens her book A White Girl Lynching Elizabeth P. Glixman says, "I interpret lynching as having an important element of individual dignity taken away from an individual or group." The poems in the book are about people who have been "lynched." As Glixman writes,

Through vibrating cords my ancestors
call me to remember
The gas, bones, in dung heap piles,
scholars, rabbis.

The poems in this slight volume are not only about major events, however. Some are about very ordinary happenings that still serve to take away dignity. "Above the Bleachers" explores the cultural expectations in which girls, not yet women, are trapped. Mesmerized by the football hero,

Bobbie's blouse
slips off her sweaty skin
like sprinkles on her first birthday cake
And the movie plays on

The book is by no means simply an attack on men. In the title poem, it is not men, but teenage girls who brutalize each other through gang violence. In yet another poem on violence, "Voices at Night", the violence reaches down into the earliest memories.

"Do you want him Dead?"

These were the words I heard before sleep
when all I wanted was a lullaby.
Butal words arrived in my ears
from the half dark hall
Whose exit lead to the back door,
Where I could see stars and pine trees
Through bulletproof square pieces of glass.

One of the unfortunate things for readers of Wordgathering is that the author did not did not include more poems on disability…and Glixman has written some excellent poems in that genre. "Poquita," "Circling" and "The Interior Decorator" rival any poem included in the chapbook. The closest that she comes to portraying disability in this collection is in "The Path of All Things," which begins:

I was drowning
Floating on the ceiling
Watching each pill they asked me to swallow,
Alice in my hospital gown.

Perhaps the reason for their omission is that they did not seem to fall under the violence umbrella, though certainly they do portray the loss of dignity.

Curiously enough, this portrait of a violent world ends in a long poem "Painted Stories From the Dutch" about a series of eight paintings that takes up about a quarter of the book. The painting poems stand in lyrical contrast to the preceding portion of the book. Each is narrated in the first person, though, each by a different narrator. Sometimes it is Bathsheba in a blue dress. Sometimes it is Vermeer. At other times it is indeterminate.

A White Girl Lynching is published by Pudding House Press, a press that deserves praise for investing in relatively unknown writers whose previously published poems show promise. They have published other writers who have appeared in Wordgathering like Therése Halsheid and Kathi Wolfe. The Puddinghouse Chapbook Series asks writers who are selected to pare their books down to less than twenty poems. In some cases, such as Wolfe’s the selection is easy since in her case, all of the poems centered around one character – Helen Keller. In Glixman’s case, though, this is a much tougher choice. How do you make seemingly disparate poems cohere into a whole that does not seem random? Glixman has chosen lynching as a metaphor violence against persons. For a few poems, such as "Cat Pantoum", violence as a unifying theme may be a bit of a stretch. Since readers approach the book from a variety of angles, though, that is up to the individual reader to judge.