The Girl Singer
MARIANNE WORTHINGTON
Reviewed by Ali Hintz
Marianne Worthington’s long-awaited debut poetry collection The Girl Singer catapults past readers’ already-high expectations. Worthington’s poems question what we owe our elders, our ancestors, our heroes, and ourselves. The text is split by subject into three parts: the first on women’s experiences in early country music, the second on the complexities of family and mourning, and the third on nature. However, through meticulous weaving, these themes radiate and converse throughout the whole book. This text may be the most finely sequenced poetry collection I have read.
The Girl Singer acts as a witness to the sins of the past without falling into empty contrition. “Barn Dance (Chorus)” asks the reader to:
…Listen. If you want
us, say the names our mothers gave us.
Recall how we really were: rawboned,
standing spraddle-legged while we
headlined those mean stages.
The Girl Singer hews to its creed and sings about both the beautiful and the ugly. Worthington does not mythologize the past. Instead, she confronts the sexism in the early country music industry in the “Barn Dance” series and the titular poem “The Girl Singer” and the speaker’s family’s racism in “War Story” and “James Brown Performs ‘Cold Sweat’ on American Bandstand, 1968.”
Form-wise, the collection is delightfully sprinkled with sonnets and includes a pantoum as well as its own take on the traditional murder story/ballad of Tom Dula. Worthington has a knack for choosing evocative verbs: “hills smear” along a highway, a stray dog “scratched up the ridge,” and “chrome / judder[s] in my ears” (italics my own). The musicality of Worthington’s verse is just plain gorgeous. “Strumming and plucking / then brushing and picking,” The Girl Singer is sure to croon its way into the Appalachian, and American, canons.