Contributor’s Marginalia: John Blair responding to Nida Sophasarun’s “The Paperback Room”

A long time ago when I was nine or eleven or thirteen years old (hard to remember, given the difficult-to-believe half-century it’s been), I spent my summers and weekends in public libraries, wandering the books. Not so much because I wanted to spend my summers that way, though I don’t recall particularly minding, but because my parents were poor people, working people, my mother a waitress and my father a young non-commissioned officer in the US Army, and they had nothing better to do with me than drop me off when the library opened and pick me up again when their working days were done, and if the librarians ever gave them side-eye about it, they never mentioned it to oblivious little me.

There was no internet, of course, and little concern about strangers and dangers, and I was lucky enough to have parents that didn’t see books in and of themselves as anything much to worry about. They both came from country people, from the deep rural south where the Bozart roamed and reading was the sort of thing that could get you marked forever as strange (my cousins, the ones that still survive, saw me then and see me now as a suspiciously bookish kind of bird, hardly the same species much less of the same feather). But my parents read, narrowly but with great enthusiasm, my father westerns and bad poetry of the Robert Service “The Cremation of Sam McGee” sort and my mother sticky romance fiction and formulaic space opera (her favorite writer and one I still occasionally return to when I need a dose of mindless escapism was a rare and wonderful composer of schlock science fiction named Andre Norton, whom I only discovered to my pleasant surprise was a woman writing pseudonymously as a man long after she was dead and gone).

I would find little bubbles of specialization on the shelves and linger there for days. Science fiction, of course, and my father’s Louis L’Amour and Zane Gray. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, both and equally. But also a few weeks of biography, Ben Franklin and General George Patton and Madame Curie, and a memorable month or so reading books about scuba diving and dreaming of sailing with Jacques Cousteau and his Aquaman-ish undersea explorers venturing deep into the places where the scary fishes roam.

And then there were the books that children must not know. These were more random, more nuggets in the chaff than troves, as these were libraries in little towns and on Army bases, and attitudes were strict about that sort of thing. Anatomy books of course, avec des schémas (nothing is more fascinating than the forbidden & clinically accurate). Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls was a happy, if disturbing, accident found loose on a shelving cart. I don’t recall how I came across Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, but that was a racy keeper if there ever was one. And Lolita, scary-strange and sad and sometimes funny, but not sexy at all, just Humbert Humbert and his terrible cruel compulsions, hunkered obscurely on a general fiction shelf.

And, of course, the Harlequin paperbacks by the untold hundreds, perched on their own tall, smutty lazy-Susan display, intended I suppose for the lonely housewives but discovered by a pre-teen me. My mother had them at home, of course, dozens that she traded and purchased used at Army base thrift stores. But that was at home and there were eyes at home and I had my paranoid suspicions that reading books for women made me something other that what I was intended to be in my parents’ literate but still deeply southern household.

What tales, though, what adventures! Schmaltzy and oddly modest. Women following their hearts, beings as otherworldly to me at the time as Phssthpok, the duck-beaked quasi-alien of my favorite science fiction novel, Larry Niven’s Protector, finding love and vaguely described sex in the all the wrong-and-then-right places. I understood why my mother read them so compulsively. Good stuff to mollify a certain kind of inexplicable yearning of the sort Nida Sophasarun ponders in her poem “The Paperback Room.”

What a lovely, thoughtful poem this is, set in a different-but-similar world of traditional fears and proscribed ideas. Young women in a library, stumbling across smut of the romance fiction kind and finding themselves enthralled by all the lurid and thoroughly dangerous possibilities. To be human is to be tempted, which is why they’ve given us all those rules and why we keep breaking them; learning that particular truth is what coming of age is about, and why we keep telling these so-familiar stories in all these different ways.

So many things in this wide world to be ashamed of, so many to seek out nonetheless, even the mildest sins of the flesh in which a girl might indulge, shed of her peacoat and her dutiful scarf among the naughty paperbacks, finding so many shameful things that are just too pleasant to resist in “the chaos of her body” as she reads inside an “icy cloister of stone and bookish girls.” Discovering she is nothing more and nothing less than “a woman who plays with the wild deities / guarding dusty truths in the next room.”

When it comes to it, that’s finally all those books of whatever kind are for, really, smutty or not, forbidden or not. Brave diver of the deep blue sea or timid seeker in a paperback novel who has, in the soapy parlance of romance, “no idea she is beautiful.” Man or woman or human being of any kind, children of whatever places made us, they offer us our deepest selves as a reward for creeping the shelves as we do, lost among the stories that are all the vicarious possibility and shameless joy anyone anywhere could ever hope to find. Sophasarun’s poem is a seditious whisper reminding us about what we can discover if we dare, those of us who remain naïve and curious wanderers of the school or public library, that place where, if the book banners haven’t gotten there first, all the intoxicating world awaits.