After the Kiss (review)

Camille has been forced to move, once again, due to her father's job, and she's unhappy in her new Georgia home. Becca is a hometown Georgia girl who's frustrated that her time with her adored boyfriend, Alec, becomes more and more limited when she has to get a job and Alec starts baseball season. A lonely and restless Alec finds his emotions reflected in Camille, whom he meets at a party. When he kisses Camille, Becca's friend captures it on her cell phone camera, and Becca breaks her own heart and his by breaking up. While Camille knows nothing of Becca, Becca recognizes her rival when she comes into the coffee shop where she works, but the story doesn't go in the expected direction of angry confrontation; instead each girl works out her various sorrows and confusions on her own. Camille's perspective is conveyed through prose poems, while Becca employs more traditional short-lined free verse to trace the path of her heartbreak. The poetry is richly allusive, with particular entries smartly and self-consciously modeled on poems by Pablo Neruda, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens among others, and the imagery is often startling with an originality that exhales into a perfect aptness for the experience. This is more than simply a language-lover's edition of traditional chick-lit fare, however; the back-and-forth interplay of perspectives calibrates the delicate edge between the poignant yearning for intimacy and the psychic need for separation, as Becca grows beyond a need to hold on to a love truly lost, and Camille lets go of the fear that's driving her away from a love that might have a chance.