The Geography of Girlhood (review)

With pithy, evocative metaphors, Smith's free-verse poems capture the fizzy energies, soul-deadened malaises, and ultra-confident poses that mark teen girl experience. As Penny moves from being a shaky fourteen ("a joke that no one gets") to a confident sixteen ("I am four tires and a miniskirt,/ I am heaven on wheels"), she flirts dangerously, makes and loses friends, and tries to sort out who she is. Her matrix of identifications consists of a sexy sister whose delinquent boyfriend she can't help but want, a mother whose wanderlust took her away from her kids permanently when they were little, and a father who sees his girls as "piles of lingerie/ . . . water-rings and dented fenders/ . . . a trail of CDs littering the road to nowhere." Smith gets the climate for her geography just right: Penny's moods are as consistently inconsistent as the tides on the shore of her small coastal town, and the things that happen—the former boyfriend who is electrocuted in a storm, the best friend who develops a mental illness and needs to be sent away for a while, the remarriage of her father that comes with a geeky, needy stepbrother, her own escape that ends in a desire to return to the home she thought was smothering her—all serve to create a softening effect, an erosion of her sharp edges into a sensitive and mature awareness of her place in her world. More original and fresh than plot or character, though, is Smith's poetry—wise, surprising, sometimes even erotic images take readers into themselves as much as they do into Penny, reminding, celebrating, and affirming the awkward charm and exuberant grace of being girl.