The Power of Storytelling: Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark,
reviewed by Rebecca Samuelson
The stories we grow up hearing, whether they are fairy tales or family folklore, have a hand in shaping our perspective on the world. Buffalo Girl is a collection that is aware of the weight stories, language, and collective histories carry. Jessica Q. Stark employs a hybrid method to peel back the layers of what it means to be a woman of color and the gravity of being able to tell your own story. Sometimes she illuminates this through collages that combine nature and personal photographs and other times it is in the silences thriving in the blank space between poem lines. The mixed media mirror the multiple perspectives and sources used throughout the pieces.
One of the most prominent threads throughout the collection is the use of Little Red Riding Hood in erasure poems. Stark uses multiple translations of the fairy tale and reimagining to highlight the pain and danger that is ever-present for women. This peril that persists in the present moment and in memory. In “Little Red Riding Hood” (22) after Charles Perrault, the final couplet emphasizes this hidden danger:
I say wolf, but there
are various kinds. (13-14)
A wolf taking the form of family members leaving you in jeopardy, strangers lurking in dark corners, or questioning your own identity are a few images that come to mind. Stark utilizes this story to present different facets of existence and exploration. She even provides each translation in the Appendix to show just how inconsistent this childhood staple story actually is.
Stark maintains a measured pace to the collection by having its three sections interspersed with pictures. There is a combination of Red Riding Hood drawings and self-made collages of the author’s mother to show how quickly fiction can turn into fact. These sections are intentionally tumultuous, so the reader is not able to steady themselves. Creating pause with the images allows a new version of a story book to emerge. You have to rethink everything that you are reading and what you’ve been told growing up to see the actual impact. Fables are not harmless, especially when they attempt to erase your family history.
In addition to visual intermissions, Stark also uses a variety of poem shapes. From prose poems to striking caesuras, she knows the importance of shifting the way a poem is presented on the page to keep the reader engaged. Even when she creates a mini series with her “Kleptomania” poems, they vary in length so you are able to easily distinguish them. This variation allows the unknowing connection between theft and women to be seen in “Kleptomania, 1993” (69–71). Stark begins the poem by speaking about stealing and how women:
mostly do it or at least
are more punishable for the
crime of taking what’s
not rightfully theirs… (4-7)
This train of thought is reflected throughout the poem. The speaker recounts their own shoplifting experiences and the theft of innocence for women of color. Stark is able to explore the power dynamic in her parents’ relationship in a way that is expansive enough for readers to also see themselves in. It also gives a face to this impulse and to what is truly being stolen.
Another form that is incredibly effective in this collection is the use of call and response. “Catalogue of Random Acts of Violence” (80) is composed of 21 questions that begin with the pinnacle “Where are you from?” Stark uses questions as a means of diving deeper instead of hindering or creating an uncertainty in the reader. The reader is left at the end of the poem with the unsatisfactory nature that arises whenever you are faced with these questions in reality:
Why didn’t she?
Why can?
Why cannot? (19-21)
These questions, directed at the mother’s actions, impact how the daughter is subsequently perceived. Stark then uses “In Earnest, She Replied:” (81) on the next page to answer with a single repeating definitive “The Woods” as the answer to all of the questions. Bringing the reader full circle to Little Red Riding Hood and the fact that answers require discovery into territory that is often treacherous and unseen.
Once the reader reaches the final section of the collection, the interrogation journey they have been taken on comes to a head in “The Furies” (92–93). Employing singlets, Stark is able to point to the pieces of suffering from a personal place:
That the woods obscure as much as they protect, that at least you can lay there
That there are so few public places to exhibit pain
That the image of the image of my mother in Vietnam is a birth certificate that
doesn’t exist (8-11)
Recounting what is lost and the inability to process these feelings publicly are both feelings the poet is concerned with. These are thoughts that are able to come forward through the reimagining of a vehicle like fairy tales. Venturing through the woods with Red Riding Hood inadvertently allows the reader to collect pieces of their own family histories.
Buffalo Girl is a collection that achieves cohesiveness through a constant unraveling and rethinking. By thinking about the connective tissue of our personal histories differently, it can bring us closer to the parts that have always remained. Stark starts and ends the book with her mother because that is where her story originates. This collection is an attempt to process what it means to be a woman of color through individual perception and the records that get left behind.
Jessica Q. Stark, Buffalo Girl, published by BOA Editions Ltd, April 2023. 136 pages.