What Girls Learn

<p class=ql-align-justify>Circling what is and is not home the girls and women in <strong>Anne Dyer Stuart</strong>'s chapbook of poems <em>What Girls Learn</em> lead lives of damage struggle and self-formation. There is a girl at the window of the burned house says one poem. Girls' ruin lies in others' hands says another. This poet is not inclined to let it lie. She narrates a life in the body with its bright optimism and its slow decay; she tells stories of pleasures and terrors the indelicate paradox of wanting to be wanted to disappear to blaze up/like a prom dress thrown on a campfire. Even the old metaphors sound new in Stuart's hands: a sixteen year old girl asked a trick question is mute as cheese. Summer is described as a slow dream turning/away rotting on the sills . . . but you will take her anyway/all the bruises mush inside your mouth/all the sweet juice sticky on your chin. <em>What Girls Learn</em> is an accurate painstaking and tender exploration of girlhood and growing up into a woman who still holds the unspoiled girl she was: Inside: sleek unblemished./Inside: the same you God/ stitched together-hastily in Heaven/ then threw down like a stone.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Lisa Williams</strong> winner of the Rome Prize in Literature and author of <em>The Gazelle in the House Woman Reading to the Sea </em>(Barnard Women Poets Prize) and <em>The Hammered Dulcimer</em> (May Swenson Poetry Award)</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p><br></p>