The girls are chimerical, elemental, and magical.

One of my favorite poems in the book is “Fire Blight” (pp. 25-26), the speaker’s moving document of life at sixteen. The speaker’s adolescence is haunted by the very real images of Hiroshima, a “poisonous” young boyfriend, and a friend’s encounter with rough sex; she reads it all in the dying light of fairy tales:

Magic and superstition, so enriching to the imagination of the girl before adolescence, ironically morph into the very real anxieties of the grown woman at the heart of poems like “Hare-Lip” (pp. 43-44), “The Sleeping Creature House” (p. 48), and “Everything an Amulet or an Omen” (pp. 51-52). In the galloping couplets of “Hare-Lip,” the speaker worries so much about her unborn child that after refusing coffee, alcohol, mascara, high-heeled boots, and to drive her own car, she is isolated at home, and can only look up to the moon, “so I blink and blink until its twisted face is perfect” (p. 44).

In the poem’s closing image, it becomes clear how a rich diet of fantastical reading (“Let’s Live in the Books of My Childhood” is about Nancy Drew) and myths about women have left the speaker with the unsatisfied hunger for perfection. Because of these themes, Pierce’s book is poignant and important reading for women and men. Some of Pierce’s titles show us the gulf between the dreamy possibilities of our youth and our real lives where we may think we fall short. “Dear Self I Might Have Been” (pp. 14-15), “She Gets Drunk and Talks Too Much at Her High School Reunion” (p. 11), “Before the Reunion (Her Lament)” (p. 49), and “Postcards from her Alternate Lives” (p. 64) tease us with what we wanted, what we thought we wanted, and the present as it exists, in all its messiness.

“The 70’s Aren’t Coming Back” (p. 59), with its time-stamped details like Melanie’s “Brand New Key,” the O’Jays, and a game show host with “large, cheerful teeth,” guarding “Door Number Three,” ends with the sound of movie sax solos drifting through the vents of a suburban house where the speaker can’t sleep. “You rode its waves into longing, / where you live now, where you’ll live forever.” Though the details change with every generation, such longing is the true magic of our aging, when we can see ourselves freshly, and can appreciate the detritus of our times.

The last poem in the collection, “Somewhere in the Heap of Minutes” (pp. 77-78), is truly a time machine, re-imagined as a carnival ride:

A last physical gesture — a grasping that occurs at the beginning of life, and at the end — makes the collection timeless: a strong, roiling evocation of living life with all the senses tuned to the peculiar. Pierce’s collection shows us that a strange and unusual vision may be powerful, and may isolate the girl, but make an artist of the woman.