Kirjahaku

Marisa Crawford's first collection of poetry evokes The Breakfast Club's angst with deliberate control and fresh upheaval. Centering on coming-of-age themes, Crawford is brutally honest yet careful in her representations and confessional moments-she invokes a preteen voice, capturing in detail female subjects, such as one who wears "cotton flowers on her undershirt," and describing "men who leave handprints all over your blankets." There is a maddening and desirous investment in the characters littered throughout: Ivy, Deidre, Virginia, Stephanie, Megan. Each girl is a catalyst for another brilliantly crafted poem; each poem is a catalyst for swizzle-stick nostalgia and a close re-examination of girlhood. The winner of the 2008 Gatewood Prize, Crawford reminds us that although we may make it out of our childhoods alive, we never quite shake our own personal geographies.

If "the realm of the personal and sexual has always been literary for men ...] and confessional for women," as Lori Saint-Martin puts it, Marisa Crawford's Diary explodes the literary/confessional binary, pushing the limits of what it means to write a poem, a diary entry, a marketing copy block. A woman works, walks, and writes, traversing Midtown Manhattan on a lunch break from a corporate day job: like her predecessors Frank O'Hara and Clarissa Dalloway, she sweeps through streets and stores, navigating the entangled pleasures and horrors of city life in late capitalism.