Joan Larkin’s Old Stranger was published yesterday by Alice James Books.  I first became a fan of Larkin’s after reading her exquisitely painful “Blackout Sonnets” from A Long Sound (1986).  It’s fascinating to me how the themes displayed in this early sonnet crown—alcoholism, recovery, rape, abortion—are revisited in Old Stranger, urgently, beautifully, almost forty years later. Her sonnets have loosened in terms of rhyme but not in terms of their power. Decidedly feminist, these poems are what readers need in these regressive times. Larkin also deals with mortality—hoarding, pain, canes—with aplomb and candor while remembering the indignities of youth.  Here is the sonnet that opens the book:

Girls Department

I stared at my shameful flesh in the three-way mirror.

Mother, my guide, my witness, pinched me between

her fingers, thinking aloud: could she work

with the skimpy seam allowance? Get it to fit?

My model-thin cousin Nancy sent me a box

of hand-me-downs: soft wool skirts, an orchid

sweater-set a size too small –– another girl’s raiment.

My sister meant well, Mother instructed,

then took me to Brigham’s for a treat: hot fudge

melted breast-like pyramids of peppermint-stick

ice cream, and I crunched the small clear candies.

I sang in a talent contest once, “Indian Love Call”

in a green tulle gown Mother grabbed from a bin.

She had an eye for a bargain. She took up the hem.

Congratulations, Joan!