Glass Town

¿American girlhood, with its anorexia and Girl Scout merit badges, piano recitals and razored self-mutilations, is the shattered `glass town¿ of Lisa Russ Spaar¿s magical poems. Setting out to `heal the old rifts-- / heaven and earth, girl / and dream,¿ Spaar records the rituals of a tribe we recognize chiefly by its fierce determination to survive¿girls, bent first on perfection, then, on returning from the banishment of our preoccupation with their bodies, their beauty.
¿What a marvel this book is! In language that manages to be both ardent and elegant, Spaar gives witness to marvelous mythologies in which `the old story: / the world for my body, / my body for the world,¿ is cancelled in a moment¿s reckoning, and Rapunzel saves herself.¿
¿Dorothy Barresi