Catie Rosemurgy's The Stranger Manual, possibly the most surprising, engaging poetry volume to appear this past year, offers strong proof—yes, by itself—for the vitality of contemporary poetry. The collection treats its several related topics (personal identity, womanhood, desire, envy, relationships, beauty, the body, the physical world, all of those things that harm and heal us) with strong voices and a mind for fictions. Its wide-ranging lyrical styles succeed in bringing those voices textually to life. The most noticeable thing about Rosemurgy's second collection is Miss Peach, the main character of many poems. Something of an inscrutable Everyman, or Everywoman, perhaps inspired by the title character of the long-running comic strip, she finds herself in curious situations announced by the titles: "Miss Peach Returns to High School to Retake Driver's Ed," "Miss Peach Visits Her Ex-Boyfriends in the Hospital," "Miss Peach by the Sea," "Miss Peach Imagines She Is an Aging British Rock Star and Explains What Honesty Is," and so on.

This creation of and commitment to a poetic character, one who reappears or speaks throughout a sequence, enjoys a rich tradition, from Philip Sidney's Renaissance alias Astrophil to Henry in John Berryman's Dream Songs. One reviewer speaks of Miss Peach as Rosemurgy's "alter ego," but this presumes an awful lot, doesn't it? Any easy identification with the author sells short the book's wildly imagined, sometimes surreal settings. Several of the poems mention a locale as well, but again, Gold River should not be too quickly seen as resembling the Upper Peninsula from which Rosemurgy hails. In fact, the poems most focused on this location were for me consistently less memorable, less inhabited let's say, than those featuring Miss Peach downstage center. She is a (self-styled, it is implied) "hobo/provocateur" who looks askance at "a pale, thin person who has not yet begun to wrinkle," and various other beautiful women or girls mentioned throughout the book. Hers is a voice in the wilderness of marketed, mediated female outlooks. Like other such voices, she comes with important messages.

Far from a familiar doppelganger, Miss Peach compels attention precisely in the ways her realistic aspects (history, sensibility, circumstances) quickly become estranged, contorted, or cartoonish. The exaggerations here convey different impressions in different poems: menacing, hilarious, victimized, deeply lonely, triumphant, revenge-fantasizing (those ex-boyfriends have "broken optical blood vessels"!). The image-central opening poem, "Miss Peach Is a Cross Between," establishes these extremes with a sequence of paired items: missing tooth and fang, a can opener and a kiss, a tube top and biohazard mask. This shiftiness captures well a person's different moods, or even split personalities. It posits that we become different people as we exalt in or endure our various experiences, or when placed under the lamp of other individuals', or a culture's, appraisals. A later poem pithily captures this range with manic-depressive suggestiveness: "Miss Peach is Julia Roberts. / Miss Peach is the act of getting out of bed in the morning." The opening line begins with a vicarious, cinematic leap, but the second line plummets to the level of basic function. As a line just earlier puts it, still tiredly if a little more gamely, "My job is to have flesh, / and I'm fairly good at it."

We're provided with a doctor's description of Miss Peach in one poem, although notice how the sentence begins by establishing a subjective framework: "Patient claims to be twelve years old // and is 3'4'', biscuit-shaped, powdery, / but incredibly adept at climbing trees." She is a cross between lawn gnome, superhero, and feral being. At least twice she is presented as sprawled in the grass, and she often assumes features straight out of Salvador Dalí: a ninja star in her mouth, her eyes leaking, a swollen head. Or she is simply doll-like, whether a voodoo doll, punctured from various acts of malice, or a series of Russian nesting dolls. One poem says as much ("Miss Peach is a Doll Within a Doll Within a Doll"), a metaphor of receding that informs the following action of peeling away girls' layers—to arrive at, what? At times the character's sex is in question. At one point she is "female impersonator," and says she resembles "a particular statue." Elsewhere she is called a "shrunken woman in a costume."

As you will have gathered by now, The Stranger Manual broadcasts freshly a sense of the difficulties faced by young women. Often this struggle involves being comfortable—or, more often, uncomfortable—with one's physical appearance, nay, existence. The poems speak of the "tyranny of the pelvis" and the "design failure" of the body, and repeatedly Miss Peach is equated with connotative objects—a grenade, a Diet Coke, a peach itself: "How we are delicious and dead at the center in so many ways." Even love tokens become objects of dependence, of desperation: "He buys me / jewelry I never wear. I love it because it piles up, which proves // I'm alive …. // My girlfriends and I can't get off the couch anymore, / and summer is seeping in under the doors."

These last lines appear late in a five-section tour de force entitled "Miss Peach: The College Years." It serves as the centerpiece of the book, both in terms of placement and thematic relevance. The collegiate setting and co-ed voices seem to extend into the marrow of the concerns raised here. I also notice that the book's epigraph says simply, "for my girls"—referring to students, perhaps? The author teaches at the College of New Jersey. In any case, Rosemurgy articulates as well as anyone this particular world, with all of its transitional challenges, personal developments, and social conventions. The last section, "Graduation Address," sounds nonchalant but applies a powerful film of nostalgia:

I think we are young.
The posters all say so,
and though no one ever officially
joined our clubs, we designed many logos.

A beautiful girl at a lecture, the board games back home—the details are eerily authoritative, and prepare the way for an ending that becomes an allegory for the fragile, emerging adult soul: "like you, I am a house // for a wet animal that is sneaking up / on something it is terrified by." That surprise turn—the animal is sneaking up not upon its prey and something to terrify, but on something that it is terrified by—represents one of the book's most vulnerable moments. (I had the chance to share this poem in a public setting recently, and its narrator sounds even more convincing and haunting when the poem is read aloud.)

The colloquial strengths of this sequence prevent its efforts at personality or maturity from feeling too ponderous, serious in the way we often expect poems to be. "Don't think I don't know how stupid I sound," one section concludes. "Please, do not think I don't know." That comic, spoken quality—resembling nothing so much as the Oscar-winning teen-speak in Diablo Cody's screenplay for Juno—belies the raw themes, here and throughout the book. "Call me romantic, / but don't I have a lover here somewhere?" Miss Peach asks, and another poem begins its lines with that casual habit of speech, "Sure, […] / Sure, […]" Once in a while, it must be said, the language becomes forgettably prosy, lengthy titles try too hard to be clever, poems end with arguably extraneous lines, or a randomness presides that leans more toward off-putting than unpredictable and inspiring. Far more frequently, however, the book feels like a verbal slam-dance, or the riffs of a stand-up comic who brings the house down. You'll find a Rolling Stones epigraph here, a werewolf sighting there, and occasionally a footnote appears, á la David Foster Wallace. A few puns are exquisite. (I particularly prize Rosemurgy's apt use of "fundamentally.") Some titles borrow the formula of an Onion headline: "Neighbor: Miss Peach's Body Didn't Turn Out Right." And if all of this wit sounds too easygoing poetically, check out the rhetorically virtuosic "Variorum" to be disabused.

The spirit of that above headline-title, too, keeps these poems from feeling frivolous, guilty of merely yucking it up. No, a darker atmosphere often prevails here. Violence surfaces in nearly every poem. Most frequently it affects Miss Peach. Her face, especially, bears all kinds of injury and indignity. Death nibbles on it. Her face seeps "like a steak thrown into the snow," or snow lifts from ice "like a face / breaking apart." One poem ends with Miss Peach's "tiny, smashed face," and elsewhere it is simply missing. Such disturbing images suggest personal dissolution and dissimulation, the latter often connected with the concealments of makeup: "Miss Peach lets her foundation run. Her face is underneath, after all, peeking through // like a rock through cut grass." In these poems, solitude (as when she observes from afar the "party I've always dreamed of") defines her character, as does meekness, unwished-for yet unavoidable, worn like an ankle bracelet. For example, she resembles a 21st-century Mrs. Dalloway in "Miss Peach Goes Shopping," which features that telling makeup counter.

Conversely, in other poems the character becomes the agent or instrument of violence. Given the slights or moments of powerlessness or despair she endures, these moments can honestly feel breathtaking, welcomed. The poet often feels more insistently present here, due to the metaphorical strategies that bring across the effect. For example, in one hypothetical comment, Miss Peach is as "common as a pen," but then suddenly the object's context changes: she becomes the "perfect instrument / for getting air into blocked throats." Moreover, we soon learn that the "man whistling from his new mouth / had not, in fact, been choking." It is as if Mrs. Dalloway had just morphed into Lisbeth Salander, the punk-hacker heroine of Steig Larsson's bestselling novels. Just so, Miss Peach at her most interesting expresses both of these feminine extremes: "A smile, a purse, an ax, / these are all the things you pick up and carry," Rosemurgy writes. Finally, though, these extremes exact their collateral damage, and the female spirit here is often lost and reeling, if not ruined. "I am plural, unknown to myself!" proclaims the speaker in a poem not connected to Miss Peach. The line echoes Whitman's famous pronouncement: "I am large, I contain multitudes." But the dramas of the personal and physical that Rosemurgy regularly delivers do not share that earlier sense of strengthening affirmation. Instead, the poems seem to claim, intimacy continually eludes us, and when we achieve it, it makes us terribly vulnerable. A few poems may celebrate in Whitman's fashion, but most settle for consolations—in naming our awkward moments, illuminating our overlooked isolations, seeking again the pieces of that face.

Miss Peach follows Rosemurgy's previous lyrical personas, the rock-and-roll couple Grace and Billy, who speak back and forth in her first poetry volume, My Favorite Apocalypse. Rosemurgy has called herself "a kind of mutant fiction writer," and her current collection does exhibit the short-story writer's flair in many poems, which often render scenes or narrate anecdotes. One poem addresses this very hybridization in typically long-lined, memorable style: "I say, don't worry: narrative and lyric hate each other, but like the rest of us they share / a house and make babies. They buy one another the perfect gifts." Her own mix of storytelling with the attentive, intensifying powers of poetry achieves productive (or reproductive) results. A few poems comment on their own art-making more figuratively: "one is stuck / with one's self and with what it's like / to have one's mouth full" feel like the awkward, frustrated lines of a poet wary of her own gifts, although this poem concludes on a very different note:

I feel a freedom

about the size of a dime
inside my head, where no one
can find it, and, like wind through
a bullet hole, it sings to me.

This is an edgier, more original vision of lyrical expression. It touches upon the license and compression that often mark great poems, yet that dime (as in diminutive), qualifying the freedom, and the bullet hole comparison that seems to enable the singing—all of these troubling limitations or wounds align with the book's dramas. And the freedom and the singing? They reside at the very center of The Stranger Manual.

Brett Foster's writing has lately appeared in Image, Kenyon Review, Poetry East, and Raritan, and his first poetry collection, The Garbage Eater, will be published by Northwestern University Press early in 2011. He is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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