#Review: Unladylike by Regina Louise

UNLADYLIKE
Poet: Regina Louise
Rating: 5/5

Some poetry asks you to admire it. Unladylike asks you to sit down with it—and, occasionally, squirm a little. Regina Louise’s collection is raw, intimate, angry, funny, sensual, spiritual and deeply personal, but what stayed with me most was how deliberately she uses language. Nothing feels overly polished for the sake of being “poetic.” The poems often sound like someone thinking, remembering, confronting and finally saying the thing she was never allowed to say.

The recurring theme of reclaiming the self is what makes the collection so resonant. Louise keeps returning to women who have been silenced, abandoned, labelled, desired, controlled or taught to make themselves smaller. In “Hope Is a Rope,” she writes, “I am / the grip, / the reach, / the spine—” and that almost childlike simplicity makes the idea hit harder. There is no elaborate metaphor needed; the woman becomes the thing holding herself up.

And that is very much Louise’s style. She likes short lines. Abrupt breaks. Lists. Repetition. Questions that aren’t really asking for answers. Sometimes she lets a sentence run and run until it feels breathless, as in “The Scream,” while elsewhere she reduces an enormous emotional truth to a handful of words: “being wanted/doesn’t mean being kept.”

Her word choices are equally striking. She moves comfortably between the sacred and the ordinary—God, gospel, Moses and scripture can sit beside fitted sheets, payphones, panties, Icees and garbage bags. “A Living Artifact of Departure” is literally structured as an inventory of what a woman carries away from a life, and somehow the mundane objects become emotional evidence.

Then there are poems like “If a Black Girl Screams,” which asks a devastatingly simple question: “does this mean / she didn’t make a sound?” That is Louise at her sharpest—few words, enormous implication.

What I loved about Unladylike is that it doesn’t seem interested in being neat. Its structure mirrors its subject: fractured, repetitive, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes tender, and ultimately moving towards reclamation. It reads less like a collection of poems and more like a woman taking back the vocabulary with which she was once defined. And perhaps that is why some of these poems don’t simply stay with you. They follow you.

Find the book here.