YA or STFU

How to (Un)Cage a Girl, by Francesca Lia Block

Block, Francesca Lia (2008). How to (Un)cage a Girl. NY: Harper Teen (Joanna Cotler Books). 128 pages.

Francesca Lia Block’s latest writing is a collection of poems divided into three distinct parts and that seem to reference both her/everygirl’s adolescence, her/not-everygirl’s adulthood and concludes with Block’s “love poems” for her (female) readers. Part 1, “Years at the Asylum” features nine poems, most of which are dedicated to describing a year in the life (e.g. the first poem is entitled “thirteen: the little oven”) and all of which shine with love and pain. While there are moments of beauty here, there are also moments of almost juvenile insight, as in the last lines of “thirteen:” “is this junior high school?/hell?/or something worse?” Part 2, “In the Lair of the Toxic Blondes” is, like much of Block’s work, both a love letter and a diatribe about Los Angeles and its star/beauty culture. Part 3, “Love Poems for Girls,” features poetry directed to Block’s “daughters and virtual daughters” as well as to fictional and real girls the narrator may have known.

Readers either love or hate Francesca Lia Block and, as someone who errs on the side of love, I realize that my assessment of her poetry will be colored by my history with her work. That said, I was not as moved by this collection as I thought I would be. On one hand, the poems were self-referential enough to seem to be personal expressions, and this made me a little uncomfortable. While I’ve enjoyed working out my own love/hate for Los Angeles (real or symbolic) with Block’s work, I’m less comfortable working on my own love/hate for Francesca Lia Block, which this collection of poetry seems to ask me to do. The first parts are so autobiographical (or, at least they seem to be) and the third so prescriptive (”for my daughter and my virtual daughters”) that the collection reads more like a therapy session on literary fame and its potential power and destruction than anything else. And yes, I can see that these themes (related to notoriety, knowledge–both public and self–and the power of the gaze to find beauty and condemn horror) are well-mined in Block’s other work, I think I appreciate them more at a metaphoric level than at a personal one.

One more thing: the cover features a misty picture of a girl identified on the book’s flap as Moira Madden, “who became friends with francesca lia block on her MySpace page and helped create the photo for the jacket of this book.” Does anyone else think this is a little over the top? It’s kind of like a rock band promotion; like “win a date with FLB!” Then again, it’s probably just sour grapes. After all, my visage is not gracing anyone’s book of poetry (sob!).