If the Girl Never Learns by Sue William Silverman (review)

If the Girl Never Learns is Sue William Silverman’s second poetry collection. Silverman is the author of a craft book on memoir writing and four books of creative nonfiction, including Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, which was made into a Lifetime original television movie. If the Girl Never Learns reads like a novel in verse. In three sections: “The Girl and the Man,” “The Girl and the Myth,” and “The Girl and the End,” Silverman tells the story of an unnamed girl who struggles to resist being consumed by man and myth (traditional myths, but also the myths surrounding womanhood).

The book opens with girl in the throes of an affair with a married man who is always referred to as “the man.” “The man” functions not only as a generic label (he could be any man) but also emphasizes the age difference between the two characters and places the adult man in a position of power over the young girl. The third-person perspective effectively creates distance between the girl and her experience. The girl does not directly narrate her story, and readers observing the girl draw their own conclusions. Silverman uses repetition and italics to visually enact the girl’s obsession with the man and her quivering desire for him:

until she staggers at the feet ofthe man, the man, the manwho wraps her in kudzu—

dense and thick.Invasive.

The ingénue and lipstick-on-his-collar stories are familiar territory, but “smudge red” on his “green-shirted heart” revives the old cliché with fresh, inventive language. It also links the poem to the next poem (“If the Girl Never Tells the Man”) in which “A smudge of baby bleeds / into the toilet like red / crayons melting.” The girl has had a miscarriage or abortion which she doesn’t disclose to the man. The “crayons” remind us that the girl is just a girl, too young to blame.

The end of the affair coincides with the end of summer at the Jersey shore:

The girl’s

smile is a last carousel ride,wood horses distortedin mirrors.

But the girl rises and rebuilds in the second section of the book, attempting to reconstruct her identity post-break-up. She imagines herself a sorcerer’s apprentice, a sibyl, a horror movie starlet. She inhabits a Bosch painting. She is a mummy “sworn to silence” who knows “who she isn’t, / but not who she is.”

The girl regrets wasting time with the man and not taking more chances. She wonders what if . . . :

If only she’d leaptfrom the windowwhen she had the chance,her body stretchedacross the stallion’s.If only she’d grippedhis mane until sheoutdistanced that life.

The repeated use of the conjunction “if” works subtly, but effectively, to create unlimited potential. The opposite of the action proposed seems always, however unlikely, also possible. Sometimes, Silverman explicitly presents both possibilities, as in the pair of poems titled “If the Girl Becomes an Assassin” and “If the Girl Doesn’t Become an Assassin.” “If the Girl Dies, or Doesn’t” contains both possibilities in the same poem. “If” presents the girl with choices and options and gives her agency over her life.

In the darkly humorous “If the Girl Goes to Hell in an Overnight Bag,” the girl arrives at a hotel “advertising neon razor blades, / remorse under glass / and complimentary despair.” It’s the kind of place you might check into with Sexton and Plath for a slumber party. But she doesn’t spend much time wallowing. Instead, she owns her “desire bright / and wild as pollen, “ “her lips ripe and independent.” In “If the Girl is a Slut,” she wishes the man would “come back / to life” so “she could kill him / again.”

In the third section, the girl “has irrepressible memories” and “envisions death.” The clever “If the Girl Does Phone Sex” explores the sometimes fine line between sex and death when she saves...