andreablythe's review
5.0
When you French-kissed the class president on the school trip to Boston and we wore yellow feathers in our hair, and I dropped my beaded red velour bag into the harbor, it opened up a crack of light for me."
-- from 8th Grade Hippie Chick
This chapbook of inter connected prose poems calls on the ghosts of memory and youth, unveiling the pain and joy of friendship and young love. Each poem captures a moment with more fluidity than a photograph and opens up the wounds and intimacies of friendship with all it's music and play and clothing and crushes.
Marisa draws on the small things ("I was wearing a silver ring that said, 'Imagine' on it."), on the little details ("A closet full of Beatles shirts. Tie-dye. A hot pink aura.") to open up aches and joys. Presented in short paragraphs of text, her words flow over one another to reveal the wider inner world of being young girls. Reading this book, I found myself nostalgic for days and ways that were not my own, longing for a youth that was at once so similar and yet vastly different from my own.
I adore this little stitched book as much as I adored Marisa's first collection of poems, The Haunted House, which touches on similar themes. I may be biased, since I know Marisa from when we worked at Aunt Lute Books together and I consider her a friend. But she has such a unique voice and her words pluck a cord inside me and resonate with my inner girlhood, and I can't wait to read more of her work. I wish her many future successes.
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