Well, that was certainly something, teenage!Lorraine

Things I Meant To Say To You When We Were Old by Merrit Malloy

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I'm not exactly sure how I acquired this poetry collection; I think a high school friend gave me several volumes of poetry she found at a used bookstore, but I could be wrong. I loved this volume of poetry when I was 14. It's very much about sexual relationships, and the frank discussion of sex outside of marriage seemed revolutionary and important and daring to a girl who was raised in a repressed, Evangelical household.

Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up for me as an adult. First, the book is full of these odd photographs that really don't add anything to the poems. In fact, many times, they actively work against the poetry; like a poem about a serious breakup will be topped with a picture of a dog in sunglasses or something. It's an extremely odd choice that didn't even register with me as a teen but seems bizarre to me now. Second, this isn't really what I'd call poetry now. It's certainly confessional, and it's certainly broken up into lines and stanzas, but there's almost none of the literary hallmarks I've come to think of as characteristic of poetry: word play, imagery, subversion of cliche, juxtaposition of the very different, etc. It's very much in the vein of poetry as diary entry. (Also, the ellipses! So many ellipses! Literally every line of every poem in this collection has at least one set of ellipses.)

Reading this I would get to lines I used to think were so profound and meant so much to me as a kid but are cringeworthy to me now, and experiencing both those emotions simultaneously is an unsettling experience.

Parts of this still speak to me; in one poem, Malloy writes: "How could you just go and die like that? / And leave me here / with all these strangers." That packs a punch. There are other similar places.

On the whole, though, I can only regard this as an interesting artifact that tells me something about my teenage self.



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