Monday Book Recs--Zimmer

42 Miles by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer is a beautiful book of poems that tell the story of JoEllen, who lives two lives, one with her mother, and one with her father. She even has different names. She goes by Ellen in the city with her mother and Joey with her father on his farm. Everything in her life seems to be divided now that her parents are divorced. She thinks about herself in terms of what characteristics she shares with her mother, and which she shares with her father.

I am not a poet. I do like poetry, even though I read it rarely. What Zimmer does in this book that is truly amazing is that she makes me believe that each of these poems might actually have been written by a teen girl. They are just rough enough, found enough, and sound easy enough for me to hear them in a girl's voice. But there are also these moments of exquisite language like:

"In front of him
the instrument case
is left open
like a hungry mouth,
the red velvet lining
peeling from each corner."

Or:
"We try everything on:
elbow-length golves
with dainty pearl buttons
and delicate moth holes.
Stained corsets
with laces and straps.
Heavy, musty dresses
in fabrics that Tamika names:
gabardine, velvet, brushed-back stain,
calico, homespun."

Or:
"he plants a garden
each spring,
churning the rich soil
with his old hand plow,
spending long days out
in its rippled rows,
the corn slowly swallowing
his crumpled frame
as the summer winds on."

There is a certain kind of poetry that tries to be arcane, that allows itself only to be opened up by those who have a specialized knowledge of all poetry ever written in the Western world. This is not that kind of poetry. This is poetry that invites the reader to read once, twice, and again and again, to taste the words on the tongue, to share them with another, to think and to admire, but not in a way that demands attention. The story and character are more important than the words. You can read this book without loving language, but you will come to love it as you read.

For me, the story was especially poignant as I remembered the two years in junior high, just the same age as JoEllen, when I decided I no longer wanted to be known by "Mette," a name that had to be explained to everyone and that was always misspelled. I went by "Marie," my easier middle name for those two years, because I wanted to hide, to fit in, to be like everyone else. And then in high school, I was happy to be myself again, to have the name that needed an explanation, to laugh when everyone misspelled it. My parents were never divorced, but I had the same sense of separation between the me at school and the me at home, and I played with different versions of myself, funny, smart, shy, theatrical, trying them on like words in a poem to see which one was right. This to me is the essence of junior high, and far more painful than high school, which was about finding friends who fit me. Finding out first who I was--yes, that is the first work of adulthood.

I will never write a book this sharp, this careful, this precise and beautiful. But I can read it, and I can play again with my own words to make them something a little closer to this perfection.