Christine Heppermann's _Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty_

The Plot: Christine Heppermann's Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty (2014) is a collection of fifty poems that uses fairy tales to confront the realities of contemporary girlhood. I am not sure that I would categorize Heppermann's Poisoned Apples as a verse novel; it more clearly resembles a traditional collection of poems with strong narrative impulses (it reminds me a lot of Francesca Lia Block's 2011 collection, Fairy Tales in Electri-City). While there is no primary character within the collection, the speaker of the poems is almost always concerned with the bodily experiences of the teenage girl. As Heppermann explains in her author's note: "fairy tales and reality... run together, even though the intersections aren't always obvious. The girl sitting quietly in class or waiting for the buss or roaming the mall doesn't want anyone to know, or doesn't know how to tell anyone, that she is locked in a tower" (109). The poems in Poisoned Apples tell the story of the social and cultural regulation placed upon the female body through the lens of fairy tales and the voice of a present-day young adult heroine. 

The Poetry: The poems in Poisoned Apples make use of lyricism, metaphor, and imagery. Formally, Heppermann primarily employs free verse, but also includes haiku and villanelle. Many of the poems are quite arresting. For example, the poem "Spotless" features a five-stanza poem juxtaposed with a black-and-white photograph of a woman in white buried to the waist in a mountain of snakes, her face averted from the viewer. The speaker of the poem in "Spotless" begins, 

So I whet one razor 

after another against the stony

flesh of my leg until in barely

any time at all I have seven sharp

lines (95).

The poem then uses anaphora and imagery in its description of the body: "as deep as the silence of my days, / as straight as the path I ran from / the huntsmen, / as red as those three drops" (95).

The Page: The poems in the collection are accompanied by black-and-white photographs by various artists. The photography adds considerably to the collection in that it contributes yet another example of the way in which fairy tales can be updated to reflect contemporary realities. 

I thoroughly enjoyed Heppermann's collection, and I give it four stars. 

Kelsey Sutton's _The Lonely Ones_

The Plot: Kelsey Sutton's 2016 verse novel The Lonely Ones follows Fain, a high school student who feels deeply disconnected from her family and her peers. Fain finds solace in writing, her imagination, and the quarry near her home. While her older brother and sister are consumed with sports, friends, and significant others, her mother and father are constantly fighting about money. Fain spends time with her younger brother Peter and enjoys caring for him, as she perceives her parents cannot. One interesting element of The Lonely Ones is the repeated reference to Fain's midnight explorations with monsters. This was a strange detail that seemed to serve as a metaphor for Fain's experiences of escape through writing and storytelling, but it ultimately became overly didactic and tired toward the end of the novel. Fain struggles at school with her peer group; early on in the narrative she meets and falls in love with a boy named Matthew, but he ultimately only considers her a friend. Midway through the narrative, Fain's younger brother becomes ill and this brings her family closer together.

The Poetry: Sutton's verse novel is told in free verse and uses short, abrupt lines. The primary poetic devices at work in The Lonely Ones include imagery and metaphor, but Sutton does not use these techniques to great effect. Often her verse comes off as cliched and purple. For example, the poem "The Hole" describes Fain's feelings after discovering her love interest does not share her feelings:

There is a hole

in my chest

where my heart

has been ripped out.

I don't know why

people call it heartbreak

when there's nothing left

to crack. (189)

This poem attempts to use the line to emphasize particular words and add weight to the scene, but ultimately Sutton's poem falls flat. Additionally, Fain's writing becomes an overly didactic tool in the final poem in the collection, where the speaker of the poem relates how she writers about "a girl who is learning" various lessons from her experiences (227).

The Page: As Sutton notes in the acknowledgement section of her book, this was her first attempt at writing poetry (and her editor's first attempt working with a verse text as well), and it shows throughout her verse novel. While elements of the narrative were at times surprising, much of the poetry lacked an attention to the ways the form can enrich narrative. I give Sutton's verse novel two stars.

Dana Walrath's _Like Water on Stone_

The Plot: Like Water on Stone (2014), Dana Walrath's debut verse novel, tells the story of the Donabedian family who live in Palu in the Armenian Highlands of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s. Walrath holds a PhD in anthropology and an MFA in creative writing, and she is the granddaughter of survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915. She notes in her author biography that she completed Like Water on Stone while she was a Fulbright scholar in Armenia. This rich personal history adds depth and significance to a narrative that follows three young protagonists-- Shahen, Sosi, and Miriam-- as they escape their home after an attack on their village leaves them orphaned. Shahen and Sosi are preteen twins and Miriam is their little sister. Shahen is depicted early on in the verse novel as wishing he could grow whiskers like his older brothers and move to America where his uncle lives without fear of the violence surrounding them. Sosi is portrayed as coming of age, experiencing the impacts of puberty on her body, and secretly beginning to fall for a boy in her town. Like Margarita Engle's Silver People, Karen Hesse's Witness, and Allan Wolf's New Found Land, Walrath's verse novel is polyvocal in that it gives voices to multiple speakers throughout the narrative. In Like Water on Stone, the voices of Shahen, Sosi, and Ardziv (an eagle) echo the strongest throughout the narrative. One of the most unique aspects of Walrath's verse novel is her use of elements of magical realism through the inclusion of an anthropomorphic speaker. The eagle's voice runs like an omniscient thread through the narrative, while the eagle himself acts a symbol of hope, strength, and protection for the young protagonists.

The Poetry: Beyond the use of persona, one of the strongest elements of poetic technique is the use of imagery. and particularly multiple characters' meditations on the eagle quill as an object of significance. In the first poem in the collection, the speaker of the poem, Ardziv, describes his view from above of the three children:

Three young ones,

one black pot,

a single quill,

and a tuft of red wool

are enough to start 

a new life

in a new land.

I know this is true

because I saw it.

We track our quills

when they fall (3).

Later in the narrative, Shahen is learning to play the oud (an eleven-stringed instrument which is the precursor to the European lute [348]) with the mizrap (a pick made of eagle quill) from his father: "Papa tells me that mystery and power / come in through the quill, / that eagles were with us / long before Christ" (88). And after their parents and older brothers are killed, Sosi rescues the single quill from the bushes and carries it as a connection to her mother: "the feather has a pattern, / ... like petals or tiny leaves / dyed into its yarn. / I found this quill with Mama (210).

The Page: Like Water on Stone is divided into four parts that each correspond with a year and a place. Part one describes the family's life in Palu in 1914, part two tells of the massacre of 1915, part three describes the young protgaonists' journey in the summer of 1915, and part four takes place in 1919. The narrative is also framed by a cast of characters list, an Armenian proverb, a map, an author's note, a glossary, and a list of resources.

I found Wathram's Like Water on Stone to be a fine verse novel, but the focus on Miriam's voice and other characters voices beyond the three primary characters (Shahen, Sosi, and the eagle) was at times distracting and repetitive. I was fascinated by the unique use of magical realism and historical focus of the verse novel though. I give Wathram's verse novel three stars.