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W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 8 Prairie Fever. By Mary Biddinger. Bowling Green, KY: Steel Toe Books, 2007. 84 pages, $12.00. Reviewed by Pamela St. Clair Manchester Community College, Manchester, CT “Some towns have the story / of a man gone mad” begins “Anklebone.” In Prairie Fever, Mary Biddinger is an unflinching storyteller, vivisecting lives deadened by loss or disappointment as boundless as the plains. These poems offer portraits of rural America that project the desolate solitude of an Edward Hopper painting, only grittier, images prickling with sensuality. At an annual fair, a caged girl unbuttons hourly to flash the heart grown outside of her body. The charged atmosphere in “Salsa at the Belair Lounge” is rendered in bursts of imagery—tongues and fingers, soft flesh of mango and avocado—as uninhibited as dancers drunk on music and margaritas. Quick, short lines capture the fast rhythm. The heavy breathing is palpable, with “[a]ll aprons off / and hot like bleeding.” Biddinger excels at this type of unexpected simile. The seemingly illogical— one poem begins, “Freakish, like a tapestry ”—makes, in context, perfect sense. Consistently, she focuses on the physicality of intimacy. Outside or in, the heart remains sealed off. Like drinking or death, intimacy is an escape. Emotional detachment creates the prevailing sense of isolation. “She knows my song,” the speaker says, acknowledging a woman across the bar. But recognition is no communion, no means of breeching distance. An unspoken uneasiness shadows the isolation and sustains tension. Images threaten: broken hinges, snagged dresses, handprints around or a daisy pinned to a neck. Declarative statements muffle emotion. The town’s story is not of a man gone mad, but of a girl gone dead. “How I wanted to be her,” wishes the speaker. These are not still lives, but stalled lives, caught like the goldfish that “circled / their plastic bag.” The cover art haunts like the apparition of the dead man in a young woman’s “bed, / in damp spaces between / my back and the hardwood floor.” A contemporary crucifix, the crossed beams of an electric pole, stands sentinel near amputated train tracks. The eye, at first, travels the ghost limbs, uncon­ sciously completing the missing rails. The broken tracks suggest content, the emptiness of aborted journeys or sacrificed lives, and form, the many line breaks that simply dazzle, bright as the lone light with which Hopper disturbs the darkness. When girls on the brink of puberty test their sexuality, the line break prostitutes them. They “walked the tracks / in terry cloth halters.” Enjambed, the stanza will turn on the image of the horizon. Hope swells in the lacuna only to be “shattered” by the windows of a high rise. In “Drift,” the title bleeds into the opening couplet: “What you did that day / beneath the tracks.” The ominous turns bucolic, “and zig zag of crabgrass,” and, just as quickly, veers into another direction, the “coneflowers bending,” like tracks disappearing around B o o k r e v ie w s 8 3 a comer or lives yielding to pressure. These poems zig and zag, leading in one direction only to tug in another. “I shake it,” is how this collection opens. And that’s exactly what we expect a good poem to do. And these are very good poems. They shake it. They unsettle. The Cowboy Qirl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart. By John Clayton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 352 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Victoria Lamont University of Waterloo, Ontario John Clayton’s The Cowboy Girl is as meticulously researched as it is a bona fide page-tumer. A biography of popular western author, newspaper editor, and rancher Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962), The Cowboy Girl is also a fascinating window into the complexities of western mythology and reality in the early twentieth century United States. In many ways, Lockhart’s western experience was not unlike that of her more well-known contemporaries, yet hers is a most unconventional life. Like Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and other privileged Easterners, Lockhart...

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