Encased in Mythos: Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark (BOA Editions, 2023)
Jessica Q. Stark’s Buffalo Girl is a stunning follow-up to her 2020 debut Savage Pageant. Markedly more personal, Buffalo Girl shares poems generated from matrilineal grief that contend with the speaker’s roles as daughter, granddaughter, and witness. Stark examines these relationships and brings voice to a problematizing ferocity that keeps the strong women of a family both protectively tense and justified. I invoke the word "problematizing" here simply as an annotation of conflict: a framework of survival and sustainability in this collection speaks to this problematizing, making clear that oftentimes life boils down to the arithmetic of what one must do to survive versus what one can do to live.
Buffalo Girl recites these poems of family largely through the lens and mythos of Red Riding Hood. Themes of hunger, strength, and the knowing consequence of companionship are present throughout the collection. For instance, in “Hungry Poem”: “everyone knows you can’t write your own death / (I know) I’ve acquired hunger across modest lines / what would it cost you to watch me eat?” Hunger, both metaphorically and physically, has been demanded for femininity for centuries, and here Stark pushes this demand further by engaging with the historic representation of hunger and melding it with the desire for witness. You, here, is transformed into both the constraining and beguiling factor.
Something consistent in Stark’s work is the magic sourced via the word you. Buffalo Girl makes so many unique subjects—both tangible and intangible—familiar that the you in Stark’s collections takes on immediate and infinite resonances. Is she dancing with the metaphysical? Is she calling forth the myth and placing herself further within the story? Or is she calling forth some familial figure who we’ve grown to know through the speaker’s eyes? The poems in Buffalo Girl don’t limit themselves with straightforward definitions: this is what enchants me as a reader.
