How to (Un)cage a Girl

This poetry lives in the adolescent, in that its focus remains for the most part superficial. Since this book of poetry is directed toward a young adult audience, this is not a bad thing.

Many of the poems center on body image, fashion, popularity, finding self, boys, and the like. They revel in

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the insecurities of the teenager. If I had read this when I was in high school, I would have been amazed, thinking, This is me. She knows. I would have believed.

Even the language itself remains very on the surface. The breaking of the lines often seems arbitrary, and the descriptions tend to be repetitive (the first things to be noticed are the shade of the eyes or the color of the hair).

There is no punctuation throughout the book, except the odd question mark. Sometimes it helped the poem, allowing the thoughts to run into one another, the way they actually do in our minds, undeliniated. Other times this was a hindrance, causing confusion in the lack.

Block brings in mythology and fairy tales to help bring these poems depth and life. And every once in a while, she breaks away into something sublime, and I find myself wanting to linger over a line. I reread it, savoring it on my tongue. And there are those few poems where I have to pause and be still for a minute after finishing, because I just need to be there for a moment before I go back to read the poem again.

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I can "hear" this book as I read it... it's lyrical and soothing and brings a comfort to me. I went through difficult teenage years, at the time feeling like an outcast, different from my peers, that no one understood me. I wrote dark (and bad) poetry, cut myself, played mind games with the boys. I

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thought I was crazy and needed to be put away, the guilt and horror of it all haunting me as time passed. But over the years I came across more and more stories of how almost all girls went through the same situations and emotional roller-coasters that I did. This is one of those books that helped me see that I was (am) not alone in the world.

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This is not your mamma’s book of poetry…unless your mamma is a fan of e.e. cummings and cummings was a woman writing from her life in a free form ode to growing up, being strong and overcoming adversity. This is definitely a book for high school girls: the rape, anorexia, sexuality,

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cancer/death/dying… might be a little much for the middle school crowd. However, it’s a raw look at some girls’ evolutions into women written from the perspective of a woman in love with Los Angeles who has seen a lot. Though some of the poems without punctuation can be difficult to read, it is a free form flow of consciousness that will appeal to the teenage brain.

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A lovely and poignant set of poems that I'd recommend to any young girl who's had growing pains, even if your experience has been different from Block's.

This slim volume of Weetzie Bat’s creator Francesca Lia Block’s poetry is a collection of subtle (and not-so-subtle) messages of feminism and what it means to grow up as a woman in this culture. The first section is a year-by-year series on the themes of sexual awakening and the need for

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independence from parents while still desperately needing parenting. The poems in this section give voice to the struggle to be an adult while still wanting to be taken care of, touching on the illness and death of a parent, body issues and sexuality, and the general goofiness of teens hanging out with their friends. The second section is on media images of women and the unfair expectations put upon girls in their adolescence. This short section is the weakest of the collection, full of references that are timely and relevant but will likely seem dated a few years from now. The third section (which makes up the majority of the book) is where the collection comes together, though. Titled "love poems for girls," they are exactly that, poems of empowerment and strength, of reassurance, of empathy. These are the poems that have the most useful, universal messages of valuing oneself and taking comfort in who you are.

While Block's language isn't always poetic in a flowy, flowery way, and her rhythm is not a strict iambic pentameter (or anything else, for that matter), the rhythm of her words has a lyricism to it that never feels clunky or forced. Her poems do sound like an adult talking to a teen, but never talking down to the teen. Sometimes all a girl needs is to know someone else has actually been there and lived through it.

This slim volume of poetry didn't always light my world on fire, but many of the poems are things I think I would have appreciated reading when I was in high school.

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I really wish I had had this book as a teenager, or heck, even a year ago when I was having a lot of body image issues. I think it really addresses that topic well for girls, particularly those of us who really enjoy women's magazines and popular culture and struggle with the images portrayed

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therein.

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Honestly...not a fan. I appreciate poetry and even dabble in it at times, but unfortunately this one was not really my cup of tea. It was interesting to learn where the cover image art stems from and there were two note-worthy poems that I will mention more in my blog post, but overall, it wasn't

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for me.

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How to (un)cage a girl is a collection poems by Francesca Lia Block. It kind of feels like a coming of age story learning to love and take care of yourself.