Dialect of a Skirt
By Erica Miriam Fabri

Reviewed by Kirsty Logan

Hanging Loose Press, 2009
ISBN 978-1934909102
Perfect bound, 88 pp., $18.00

The poems in Dialect of a Skirt are flowers worn in the hair, rhinestones stitched along a hem, lacey corselettes under a vintage dress. They are lovely and loving. They shape a world of underskirts and negligees, lipstick and gem-studded rings. In the first poem, 'Dear Poetry Editor, Please Publish My Poems', Erica Miriam Fabri offers to show us a view of her city and herself. This is exactly what she does: shows us. The poems get beneath the make-up to the bumps and blemishes underneath, but they go no further. They do not dig to the viscera, the marrow, of the poet or of the world she inhabits. Dialect of a Skirt does contain brief flashes of glory and truth, but is that enough to hold a collection together?

Dialect of a Skirt is split into five sections, each titled with a different item of women's clothing – pencil skirt, garter belt, corset, miniskirt – except the final one, incongruously called 'The Silk Shop'. The logic grouping the poems together is unclear. The first few poems in 'The Pencil Skirt' are about male-female relationships, and then suddenly they're not any more. The first few in 'The Garter Belt' are about female celebrities, then they're not. The first few in 'The Corset' about pregnancy, then not. Perhaps people cleverer than myself (and there are many such people) would be able to figure out how these titles apply to the poems, but it passed me by.

The collection might not make sense structurally, but there's much more than narrative arc going on in these poems. Fabri uses some interesting techniques: 'The Word-Lover's Miscarriage' consists of just one sentence, then 30 lines of footnotes that explore each word in order to tell the story. Often techniques like these are used just to be quirky, but in this poem the structure is wonderfully explored and fits the language well. Word, for example, is defined as:

"1. sounds that poets use to make music 2. letters of the alphabet when they've formed clubs 3. what he hasn't uttered to her in three years"

The He said/She said structure is used in five separate poems, and it becomes tiresome. 'Socks and Swimsuits' uses the slight variation of The boy said/The girl said, and the result is a sweet poem with a funny and slightly uncomfortable ending: "The boy said, Okay. I only have one ball. / The girl said, No way."

However, with all the other He said/She said poems it seemed like a different structure would have been more interesting and effective.

 Dialect of a Skirt is by no means a bad collection; it is just a little too long. Some of the poems are beautiful, chilling, upsetting and insolent. Unfortunately, many of them just fell through my brain without leaving a trace, and the collection would have been much stronger if these weaker poems had been left out. Many appear to tread the same ground: beautiful poet, misunderstanding lover, undertone of violence. We have "When the Muse comes home he wants to know where his supper is", "He is so violent/with your love. And jealous." and "He said: You'll get fat and sleep in my bed./She said: I'll burn the bed." None of these poems is bad, but including them all in the same collection feels repetitive.

There are definite high points in this collection, such as the inventiveness of 'The Word-Lover's Miscarriage', the fast-paced narrative of 'How To Make A "Virgin"', and the claustrophobic circularity of 'The Smallest Bird on Earth'. But the repetitive themes grate a little, and some of the poems seem to just say the same idea in different phrasings. With stricter editing, Dialect of a Skirt could have gone from a good collection to a wonderful one.

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Kirsty Logan writes stories and other things. She is the co-editor of Fractured West and review editor for PANK. Get in touch at www.kirstylogan.com.

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