What It Feels Like for a Girl, Jennica Harper

“When you are thirteen/the world is a small room,” Jennica Harper’s novella-length series of poems begins. Provocatively and evocatively titled What It Feels Like for a Girl, the book flings opens the door to the world of the teenage girl.  Harper certainly includes the expected subjects: puberty, bras, dances, crushes.  What makes her poems original is that Harper does not stop there; she navigates the treacherous territory of burgeoning sexuality and experimentation.

The collection centers on the relationship between two 13-year-old girls — the main character, and her worldly, “girl-woman” best friend, Angel.  Mostly written in couplets (pairs of lines) and in the second person, the poems sound urgent and private, reinforcing the intimacy of the friendship between these girls. The main character meets Angel in gym class: “She makes the shorts look good./ She tells you the teacher’s gay./ You never thought of teachers one way/ or the other...By noticing you, she makes you.”

Together, the girls listen to the sexually-charged songs of Madonna and look at pornography. Harper intones, “Bodies are hidden everywhere, waiting to be/ cracked open.” When Angel performs a partial striptease at a school dance, is suspended, and then moves away, the main character distances herself from her friend. She struggles to process her emotions, and Harper writes, “It is years before you’re able/ to think of her plainly, as a girl/ exploring her body’s boundaries.”