cover image Girl Hurt

Girl Hurt

E. J. Laino, Miller Laino. Alice James Books, $9.95 (70pp) ISBN 978-1-882295-07-4

""Her life/ started out as a failed attempt/ to say what was happening to her body,"" Laino announces in the first poem of this stunning debut collection. Set in a world of factory workers, hostile family members and alcoholics, her poems tell of suicides watched by children, of a baby given up at birth and a fetus sucked from a Catholic womb. Yet there are no victims here; instead the determined voice of a teenager using sex as an escape route: ""Anything that took me away from that family,/ dying in silence, from silence, was a good thing."" The poems show the speaker exploring anger, disappointment and loss on a difficult journey to maturity. Several pieces brilliantly capture the young child's fear of her mother's death, the mother's warning that her children ``will be the death of me yet'' and then the sudden dying bringing on its unexpected, breathtaking absence. The shorter, lyrical love poems with which the volume ends maintain all the vitality of their predecessors, proving that Laino is no one-theme, one-book poet. Readers will eagerly await her next collection. (Jan.)