By
– August 26, 2011
Melissa Broder’s When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother is a series of up-close and personal poems that all together offer a vision of growing into womanhood.
These poems are about making mistakes, experiencing “firsts,” and learning lessons and are enveloped in humor and — for many readers, including myself — familiarity. In fact, some of them are the exact poems I attempted to write after significant moments and revelations in my own life. Alas, Broder has done a better job.
In “At his Aunt Sheila’s house in Taos,” the narrator recalls a first urinary tract infection: “I was in pain the place I peed, but scared to say/… the truth was, if someone had told me: Urinate/after you have sex with him, hippie-rabbit, I wouldn’t have/lain there on the clay floor.”
Similarly, poems about anorexia (“Prayer of the Teenage waif”), dealing with a boyfriend’s porn habit (“Why she lets him go to Reno and Sleep with whores”), and abortions (“Margaret Sanger Never Said”) all bear witness to a modern female experience in the US.
For some, Broder’s Jewish poems resonate on an even deeper identity wavelength. In “We will find ourselves hating a blonde stranger,” she writes, “when the tow-headed strangers attended/our bat mitzvahs in schleppy paisley sundresses/we trembled big in black, with some appetite./What was expected of us but to stay sane?/Plenty of things. Abstain from honey-baked hams/Nantucket, seersucker, Volkswagen”
All together, the collection is a bunch of Ah-ha moments in poetry form. Melissa Broder has lived out what we all have, but she has found a way to successfully communicate the message in verse.
These poems are about making mistakes, experiencing “firsts,” and learning lessons and are enveloped in humor and — for many readers, including myself — familiarity. In fact, some of them are the exact poems I attempted to write after significant moments and revelations in my own life. Alas, Broder has done a better job.
In “At his Aunt Sheila’s house in Taos,” the narrator recalls a first urinary tract infection: “I was in pain the place I peed, but scared to say/… the truth was, if someone had told me: Urinate/after you have sex with him, hippie-rabbit, I wouldn’t have/lain there on the clay floor.”
Similarly, poems about anorexia (“Prayer of the Teenage waif”), dealing with a boyfriend’s porn habit (“Why she lets him go to Reno and Sleep with whores”), and abortions (“Margaret Sanger Never Said”) all bear witness to a modern female experience in the US.
For some, Broder’s Jewish poems resonate on an even deeper identity wavelength. In “We will find ourselves hating a blonde stranger,” she writes, “when the tow-headed strangers attended/our bat mitzvahs in schleppy paisley sundresses/we trembled big in black, with some appetite./What was expected of us but to stay sane?/Plenty of things. Abstain from honey-baked hams/Nantucket, seersucker, Volkswagen”
All together, the collection is a bunch of Ah-ha moments in poetry form. Melissa Broder has lived out what we all have, but she has found a way to successfully communicate the message in verse.
Read Melissa Broder’s Posts for the Visiting Scribe
Jewish vs. Goyish: The Year in Review
B‑Sides with Melissa Broder
Famous Jews You Went to Hebrew School With
Melissa Broder’s Pen Pal # 1
Melissa Broder’s Pen Pal #2
Margaret Teich is a freelance environmental writer and eco-consultant living in New York City. Check out her blog, Gspotting.net.
