According to Her Contours

Booknews

Compelling personal poems by a lesbian writer who wanted to be a Harlem Globetrotter--instead became a high school English teacher. Published by Black Sparrow Press, 24 Tenth Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Marie Kuda

In a handful of stories and a few dozen poems, Boutilier captures the passage from childhood to maturity in the fresh images of an outsider with an insider's knowledge of the rules. Her girls hit baseballs, throw footballs, outwit teachers, strike bargains with parents so they won't have to wear dresses, know they don't want to be boys but want all the freedom of male privilege. Her women deal with angst over missed periods, battering, eating disorders, marriages gone wrong, aging bodies, and loneliness. Reviving the shaped poem, her verses on anorexia shrink across the page in ever-shorter lines, while those on fasting stand in a tidy column of two- and three-syllable lines. Images of the boulder of Sisyphus colliding with an Exxon tanker or of voices like "frying pans / speeding heavily across the room," and depictions of lesbian nuns, men dying of AIDS, or three generations of women laughing over their reflections in each other as they spread the Thanksgiving tablecloth--these linger long after the pages have turned. In all, an exciting exploration of relationships, gender identity, and the politics of clothes from a woman who chose high tops over high heels and has the courage to love her family and her lesbianism, the anger to write about South Africa and address a poem "To My Rapist."