What Kind of Woman

The day before my trip, the day the friend I was going to see died, I went out to my local bookstore to find a book to bring her in the hospital and found Kate Baer’s volume of poems, What Kind of Woman. I read a few of the poems while standing in the store and thought my friend would like them (she wasn’t hard to please, especially with poetry).

One of the poems I read was “Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels,” a phrase any 21st-century woman has heard over and over, and I liked its list of “unless you count” things, including “your grandmother’s/cake” and “the taste of the sea.”

They’re accessible poems, suited to being read while standing up in a bookstore and feeling one or two sparks of recognition. If you’re looking for more, these poems won’t deliver, but you may be satisfied with the delight of the situation Baer sets up in each poem, like “For the Advice Cards at Bridal Showers” which draws readers in with
“Go to bed angry. Wake up with a plan. When
someone asks for the secret to a happy marriage,
remember you don’t know. This is not a happy
ending. This is not a fairy tale. This is the beginning
of a life you haven’t met.”
I found the ending of this poem less satisfying than its great beginning:
“For now just remember how you felt the day you
were born: desperate for magic, ready to love.”

Similarly, there are poems entitled “Commencement Address,” “Vow Renewal,” “On Our Anniversary,” and “For the Advice Cards at Baby Showers.”

There are three poems characterizing what people say in various situations: “Things Men Say to Me,” “What Children Say,” and “What Mothers Say.” I found these evocative, enjoying lines like the men saying “Fun fact! I don’t normally read women writers/but I have read you” and the children saying “You need to help/me. Help me faster. Do it the way/I asked you to.”

My favorite poem in the volume is “When I Ask My Grandmother Why She Let Him Come Back Home”:

There is so much more to love.
I would have missed it—
the ducks and chickens, children calling
from the yard. The way he’d say you are so
beautiful. One cannot complete the other.
One cannot hold on to brokenness.
The cruel things we could have done—

I would have missed the ball games. His
eyes searching across a swarming table,
the thrill of spring and heavy snow.

Think about it—every wedding, every
Sunday, every light strung across the living
room.

I would have missed all this.

The last poem in the volume is about grief, and that’s a nice bonus for a book I bought to give someone else and will now put on my own bookshelf. It ends with the thought that, whatever happens, you can “listen for the catbird calling. No matter/the wreckage, they still sing for you.” That’s true outside, right now (according to the Merlin Bird ID app on my phone). And Tristan is sleeping on the stairs, where the yellow azaleas are blooming.