boysgirls
Katie Farris, Marick Press (76 pgs.)
There is a girl who writes a little yellow book, yellow but not decadent, with a black and white half dust jacket that lets a mysterious compound word float in that sunny yellow. A strange chimera inhabits that jacket, wrapped like a ribbon round a present that’s already been opened; a present that can be opened by anyone, anyone at all. But is a present always a gift? The little yellow book opens its mouth and invites you to inspect its little, straight, crooked black teeth. It doesn’t say anything as trite as not to look a gift horse in the mouth—in fact, it demands you climb in with a grin. Come frolic with bared teeth, says Katie Farris at the end of her introduction; soon, you are grinning with a glee both disquieting and liberating.
If you get past that introduction, of course; the letter to the reader that kicks off Farris’ collection of fables, entitled boysgirls, is perhaps the only wrong note to be sounded in this mysterious but clairvoyant exploration of parable, mythmaking and figuration. When Farris adopts the knowing, slightly precious tone of the storyteller, prefacing what’s to happen, she’s engaging in long tradition but one that’s fairly thin from overuse in a thousand fantasy novels; a voice that says But between these covers you will participate, whether you desire it or not the reader who thinks “Oh really?” must resist the urge to toss this very slight book aside. Because once Farris begins “Mise En Ebyme” with the sentences “People are forever falling for the girl with a mirror for a face. And why not? They think, not unaware of the irony. Of course, one has to be careful in direct sunlight…” the reader quickly falls for Farris’ tone. Her language is poised between a fantastic, fairy-tale generality and concrete rhythms of the everyday that serves these tales well.
Farris uses this fairy-tale tone to cleverly explore, via metaphor, the transformations of girls: those that they rush headlong into, those they cannot escape. They are pitched somewhere between prose poems—at least, the kind that turn their faces to the wall when that hybrid is invoked—and universalized vignettes that reflect, through a mysterious distorted mirror, some very private but apprehensible situations. When she describes how “Her mother’s mother was a machete” in the story of the same name, she conjures a whole range of personality without explicitly exploiting personal history: “On such occasions she made the girl turn her in front of the mirror, murmuring ‘Aren’t you delightful. I used to be a beautiful blade. Look at me now. I used to be beautiful.’ After they watch the moon rise, the girl carries her grandmother back to her bedroom, lowers the blinds, pulls the covers up around her shoulder’s blade.” It’s little details like that “shoulder’s blade” that gives these tales their poetic punch.
This little book, interspersed with complementary drawings by Lavinia Hanachuic, ends with a longer parable about the meaning of being an artist and the burden that places on love, featuring the Boy With One Wing and the Inventor of Invented Things, both of whom linger after the reader has closed this curiously affecting volume. Katie Farris’ boysgirls is slight, but it’s slight the way a blade of sunlight forces a crack in the wall.
Gregory Crosby was once an art critic, until he got over it. His poems have appeared in Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Paradigm, and Ophelia Street, among other nice places.