Stop Wanting by Lizzie Harris (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014)

This debut collection (a 2013 Open Book selection, chosen by Tracy K. Smith) from Lizzie Harris deals with sexual abuse and the wake of pain to be dealt with following. The poems are gathered into four sections, and the book opens with a preface poem, “Mythology,” which almost serves as a warning of the rawness that is to follow: “I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories,” it opens. The trauma of abuse is revealed early at the end of section 1, with poem “Swan Princess, 1994”:

For years, that night sparkles
like the shell of a mussel,
the easy memory of love. But if I follow
the long string of logic, the glow
darkens to a clot.

I’m ready to know, but
the shell won’t open.
it hangs like an eyelid of stone.

The remaining three sections, however, is where so much of the heart of this collection lies. The abuse is the point of impact, and the following sections are a map of recovery and aftermath through the ripples of effect coming from the point of impact (which the cover design reflects). The first poems in section 2 are ferociously raw, such as “White Loss of Forgetting”:

                I remember the touching

was softer than I wanted

and after           I wanted things quiet
because I didn’t trust the skin
that skinned my little body    I don’t want to be vague

he had my body run the water
he took my body for a carpet
he took my body from men
I would one day want to love me
I don’t want to be vague

In this section, we are also introduced to “birdie”, a coping mechanism about which Harris writes “What if Birdie is a word / for asking breath to leave a body?” to look straight at the traumatic abuse by the speaker’s father, but to come at it in a round-about way, a way of shutting down to protect the speaker. In the last two sections, we get a few scalding direct glances at the abuse and the abuser, in addition to context of familial relationships feeding into the speaker’s story. The ending isn’t a clean slate, but rather a careful look to a possible future. We also get a few glimpses of consensual love and sex, and how the trauma affects those relationships, such as “Want Stopping”:

I’m so blanched with blue now
how was I as meek as a penny in your loafer
how did I stroll without a spine or pulse
for a moment I was a train-car         the landscape
paned me                           with you moving tall
as trees                  please               I miss your jaw
resting on my shoulder
cup in saucer
man that I love for a moment love me

While many of the poems follow typical format of stanzas flowing straight down the page, Harris deftly wields diverse forms that she sprinkles throughout. These different tactics, such as blank space to punctuate and pause, tabbing over to carry the reader across the page with her, and even footnotes without the actual notes, keep the writing fresh and engaging, without getting too heavy (since the content is heavy enough as is).

This collection of poems brings to mind Matt Rasumussen’s Black Aperture (which we reviewed here), if only because both are debut collection of each poet, and both deal with intensely personal and traumatic situations, working through it as the pages go on. Harris writes in a way that leads the reader through the process of the trauma, with vivid grief and the loss of trust, of self, of so much more. As the speaker works through all of this, so do we, the readers.

Stop Wanting was one of Cosmo’s “10 Books by Women You Have To Read This Spring.” Harris’ poetry has appeared in The Caroline Quarterly, Barrow Street, Sixth Finch, and more. From Brooklyn, NY, she’s also the poetry editor for Bodega Magazine.

What other poets write through processes in a way that allows the reader to join them? Are there other collections that are deeply personal, while still maintaining poetic integrity?