The Endless Possibilities of the Present
If the Girl Never Learns by Sue William Silverman
Brick Mantel Books (April 2, 2019)
Reviewed by Christa Rohrbach
The balance between the said and unsaid creates a whirlpool of emotions that bubbles beneath the surface in Sue William Silverman’s latest book of poetry, If the Girl Never Learns. Silverman crafts feelings of devastation, anxiety, trepidation, and ultimately triumph alongside the shared speaker as she weaves herself around the scenarios each poem presents. The collection uses these poems to pose hypotheticals that seemingly contradict one another—throughout the course of the book we consider, alongside the girl, the seemingly innumerable results that could come from the actions posed in each poem, each preceded by the reverberating “if.”
In one poem the girl could become an assassin, or not. In another poem she is presented as a sorcerer’s apprentice, though this presentation remains unconfirmed by any of the text. She could even be a horror movie starlet, we discover, as the collection progresses—or not. The message simmering beneath the surface of each contradicting hypothetical is that the possibilities in this book are as endless as they are limited if the girl is able to harness her power and resist the destruction laid out before her.
I found myself becoming more and more engrossed in the presentation of these innumerable successes, challenges, and outcomes in the poems as I kept reading because their potential felt so linked to how a life is experienced. Each day, we wake up with the same choices: to fall into what has been pressed down upon us or to face our personal challenges and confront them. Everything that happens in this collection starts with the protagonist’s reaction to her surroundings, and these reactions are ultimately what open the door for her to seize her own strengths. This seizure of strength is not an easy choice, nor a perfect one—but we remain aware that what lies within the words that are spoken is only half of the story. The power of this poetry lies in the balance that is uncovered through this tension between surface-level communication and what bubbles below in the subterranean levels, communicating both the destructive future the girl could embrace alongside the power rumbling beneath the surface in only one phrase.
Despite the balance struck here between the gruesome and defiant details in these poetic fates outlined by Silverman, I cannot help but feel restored after finishing the collection. It is as if I have been transformed alongside the girl into a new iteration of identity with each progressing line, and yet a small piece of the girl at the heart of these poems is also revealed in these descriptions. The reverberating “if” throughout each of these poems thus becomes the catalyst on which these possibilities hinge, casting readers at once in the present moment and towards a future that is, as of yet, undefined. These future moments are steeped in images as gruesome and haunting as they are beautiful—“a skull / embroidered in her / stomach,” “a birthmark whose disputed, opaque borders / define who she isn’t,” “mercury sizzling / her palm.”
We follow the girl through escaping a Bosch painting, walking into Lake Michigan, and going to hell in an overnight bag among other dystopian futures that each seem incongruent with one another. But linking all of these potentials together is the yearning to be loved that the girl expresses within each image, line, and phrase of the book—a love that appears on the surface to be held by “the man” in these poems. Upon closer examination, it is clear that this love is instead something that the girl must earn from herself. As the last few lines of the collection state:
There’s a border between
life and death and she’s
crossed it, or perhaps erased it.
Her passport has a thumbnail
photo like an obituary
headshot. If a guard challenges her
to show her papers,
she’ll say she’s an expatriate
from life and dare him
to send her back.
Silverman’s work in If the Girl Never Learns balances in this proposed area between life and death, hovering at once betwixt the oppressions experienced by the speaker and the subversion of the textual limitations mapped over her. As we travel alongside the girl through If the Girl Never Learns from “The Girl and the Man” to “The Girl and the Myth” and finally “The Girl and the End,” we find that the final moments that have been laid over this girl figure are merely representative of another beginning—a journey no reader will want to miss.
CHRISTA ROHRBACH is a reader and writer working toward her MFA in fiction at Western Washington University. She dabbles in hybrid writing, fiction, and poetry and is currently working on a hybrid novel and a collection of short stories.
Featured image “tracks” by Fred Pulver