Allegheny Women

These rich narrative poems are brimming with stories of a girl "on the precipice of puberty," who is "learning to live with being female." She is being raised by a strong single mother in Appalachia-"that land of crisscrossed valleys, where ridges chaperoned girls on their straight, narrow paths" and where life is as "rigid as the rules a woman must live by in 1965 rural Pennsylvania." Lisa McMonagle's poetry makes you wish you could meet her mother-a woman best described by the hardwood locust trees of Appalachia who "burned as hot as locust wood when defending those she loved." But more than the characters, it is the language that makes this book a must read. Imagine describing a Playboy magazine examined by two teenage girls as "Between us we held the magazine like two sopranos sharing a hymnal," or her grandmother's mealtime words of grace as "happiness diluted always with a little sorrow¿a Baptist Yin-Yang." Or the way the poetry describes the young woman preparing for life beyond Appalachia-

"I honed my tongue on the whetstone of elocution to pare away the slack in my words

crick to creek

critter to creature

until each string of phonemes stood up straight and alert."

-Steven Deutsch, author of Brooklyn and Slipping Away



Lisa McMonagle captures the spirit, the pride, and the sacrifices of women in Appalachia, especially one woman, her mother, who left a brutal marriage and retreated to family, entering "a kind of indentured servitude, a trade for shelter" to ensure her children's future. Women's roles, their stricture, their rebellions and small triumphs are captured here through images of clothes carried on "the crook of her hip where women carry babies and other burdens," and through a rebellious daughter who cross-stitches the forbidden word "ain't" on her requisite sampler. We meet her grandmother, proud and rigid, whose mealtime grace was to remind "that God provides food to fulfill His will on earth, not to please our palates."

McMonagle also shows us the pleasures of childhood in her small mountain community-playing jacks and hopscotch, ice skating, chasing a hearse to the graveyard, going to the Firemen's Carnival-while not forgetting its prejudices and ignorance-a hyperactive cousin, whipped regularly with a belt by his father, and another cousin's death from AIDS, his mother claiming he died "from a bad cold."

This wonderful collection reads like a novel, evoking the essence of time and place, told through women's lives.

-Sarah Russell, author of I lost summer somewhere and Today and Other Seasons