Contributor’s Marginalia: Therese Gleason responding to Amanda Gunn’s “Girl”

Amanda Gunn’s “Girl” appears prose-like on the page, but this poem has curves. Woven throughout the block of text—sturdy and utilitarian as the “dungarees” worn (and perhaps sewn) by the speaker’s mother—are shimmers of rhythm and rhyme, an insistent song that builds to a crescendo. From the poem’s first lines, form and subject matter are in conversation, even conflict, as the speaker tries on beliefs about womanhood passed from mother to daughter, across generations. The poem’s long lines roll across the page from margin to margin like bolts of cloth unspooled, and the justified formatting of the text yields unequal spacing between some words, creating the appearance of threadbare areas, as in hand-me-down clothes—and ideas. Gunn has a knack for fresh and subtle rhymes, rendered in plain-spoken diction, that surprise and delight. Echoes of iambic pentameter, slant rhymes, and assonance in the first two lines establish a pattern of musicality that is carried throughout the poem: “A girl among boys is in most ways alone. My brothers / were mean, then sweet, then packed and gone.”

Tracing the ways her mother and grandmothers dressed—and lived—the speaker examines what she’s been taught, explicitly and implicitly, about expressing her gender and sexuality. The mother who looks “sideways” at how the speaker has grown (“my hair down my neck, my shorts too short. Too fast. Too grown”) “had hands that worked…cotton shirts, not ruffled or pleated or flounced or flirty.” Here, “fast” functions not only as an adverb (how quickly the girl has grown up) but also an adjective laden with misogynistic baggage, suggesting a woman of questionable sexual morals. “Grown,” too, connotes not only coming of age but also the maturation of the female body: the development of breasts and hips. Of her mother, “quiet and small and tenacious as a mouse,” the speaker notes

I don’t think she ever said no; more like an Oh. A careful sniff. So
I somehow lost my girlier gear, those things she called prissy:
feathered hair, big hoops swinging.”

At the heart of the poem is ambivalence: how can the “girl,” once “grown,” come into her own, shedding ill-fitting hand-me-downs, without rejecting her roots? Years later, when the speaker’s mother tells her “she hadn’t meant to be tough,” she explains that

…Her mama had been the salt of the earth.
Cleaned nights at Mercy, though she’d sneak a spray of Oscar de la
Renta on a holiday or for Sunday Best. Dressed clean for the Lord.
Clean for his glory. Her mother before had gone to church and
cooked the meals. Nothing less, but never more.

The legacy of her modest, hard-working and God-fearing foremothers weighing heavy, the speaker asks: “What could I do / but follow their ways, these sturdy women who’d brought me / forth?” Her tone by turns tender and ironic—“fine thing, being grown”—the speaker interrogates the pressure (familial, religious, societal) for women to be “nothing less, but never more,” a liminal, and limiting, existence. Even now, the speaker struggles to get out the door—“lipstick on, then lipstick off, and bright blouse on, then something plain,” asking herself “can I be this thing? The kind of woman with night blue lips who’s flashing, perhaps, a gaudy ring?”

By way of compromise, the speaker “step[s] out in ways that can’t be seen, a liner-and-lip-gloss / subtle sheen and, like my grandma, perfume that poof! like a / dandelion puff, disappears into eternity.” The word play and rhyme of “perfume,” “poof!” and “puff” (not to mention the “dandy” in dandelion) highlight the metaphor for inherited belief systems spreading like seeds on the wind, taking root where they land in the fertile soil of history and memory—coming back, year after year, ephemeral yet persistent. Building on the metaphor, and layering in more rhyme, the speaker goes on: “This femme I am, to / whom I’m lost and held and bound, she’s cloaked in vapors, reading and scribbling deep in her papers, doing as her mama would want her to do.” Eschewing resolution, the poem ends with humor and hyperbole, invoking the Barbie (doll)-esque singer, Dolly Parton, a near caricature of over-the-top glamour and glitz, asking the rhetorical question “So when—when for Dolly’s lamé-wearing, high-heeled sake do I get to begin?” While no simplistic answers are provided, the poem ends with insight, the tightness of the rhyme scheme in the last three lines conveying clarity and authority:

This thing I wear that looks like grace or
reserve or taste but sits on my skin like a stain or a sin, this thing
I bear but cannot name, it may be this: a borrowed shame.