Dialect of a Skirt [Paperback]

Erica Fabri (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2009

"These aren't poems. They're ball gowns." Rachel McKibbens "Wouldn't you like to know what happened when Marilyn Monroe made love to Joan Crawford? (Hint: a webbed foot was involved.) Why holy is a secular world? What Barack Obama's grandmother thought? What the poet said to the truck driver? And why a fourteen-year-old girl would throw her newborn out a window? In Erica's impressive first collection we hear a myriad of characters speak some hilarious, some ironic, some tragic and we can t help but listen. And learn." Sharon Mesmer "The poems in Dialect...are raw, honest, and built of a dance that takes place in trees. They are that kung-fu. This first book of Fabri's challenges the landscape of contemporary verse and makes us joyful for having followed her in the end." Roger Bonair-Agard

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Erica Miriam Fabri is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and received her MFA in poetry from the New School. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Texas Review, Hanging Loose, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The New York Quarterly and Good Foot Magazine. She has lectured and led seminars at Cooper Union School of Arts, New York University, Columbia University and Penn State University. She is also a spoken word mentor and curriculum writer for Urban Word NYC. She currently teaches creative writing and performance poetry at The School of Visual Arts, Pace University and for the City University of New York (CUNY) at Hunter College and Baruch College. This is her first book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Hanging Loose Press (November 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934909106
• ISBN-13: 978-1934909102
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,110,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Her experiences are raw, and make "Dialect of a Skirt" quite the read, January 16, 2010

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dialect of a Skirt (Paperback)

Looks can be deceiving, there can be quite the mind behind the person you may dismiss as another New York girl. "Dialect of a Skirt" is a collection of poetry from Erica Miriam Fabri, a poet and teacher of creative writing and performance poetry at the City University of New York. Her experiences are raw, and make "Dialect of a Skirt" quite the read. "The Monster": After she made love to the Monster,/she wanted to burn her hair./Can you blame her?/He left something rotten there./Even witch hazel/won't make her clean.

4.0 out of 5 stars Smart, poignant and subtly complex, November 25, 2009

By 

Guy L. Gonzalez "Malcontent" (Bloomfield, NJ) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dialect of a Skirt (Paperback)

Generally speaking, I prefer my poetry a la carte or in thematic anthologies; I'm not a fan of individual collections of poetry unless a poet has a significant body of work that can be editorially curated with an unbiased eye. Erica Miriam Fabri's Dialect of a Skirt (Hanging Loose Press, 2009) is a welcome exception to my rule; while arguably 10-15 pages longer than necessary, it's an engaging collection of poems and is a worthy addition to any poetry bookshelf.

From the smart-aleck opening of "Dear Poetry Editor, Please Publish My Poems"...

I will be frank: I want to become a poet
while I am still young and rare.
I want to be a foxy poet.

to the poignancy of "The First Plastic Surgery Patient on Earth"...

Now, a woman can buy herself an upper lip,
she can have the ugly sucked right out of her with a straw.
He could have given her mangoes for breasts.
The ankles of peacocks.
The cheekbones of the Goddess Lakshmi.

Some say she threw herself into the river,
Face first.
Some say she's swimming there still.

to the subtle complexities of "Twenty-Four Hours"...

As we dive into the deep part, I wonder if you are ever sad.
If you will ever need anyone. Just after two, I get up
to use the toilet. You wake and think I've left,
until you see my panties next to the pillow and my
earrings on the nightstand. When I get back
to the bed, I find you waiting for me. Don't ever
do that again, you say, Next time, leave a note.
Before I'm under the blanket, you're snoring.
In the morning, you tell me you dreamt of flying.
But not too high. Only about eight feet off the ground,
and very slow.

Fabri's strong voice, ear for nuance, and self-confidence are on full display. She never shies from being as concise as each individual poem calls for or letting them breathe when necessary, and she experiments with rhythm and line breaks in ways that don't feel precious or self-indulgent. One of her most interesting poems is "The Word-Lover's Miscarriage" -- 11 words, each one with a footnote that is effectively a poem itself.

The one flaw of the book, and it's purely subjective, is its structure, broken into 5 sections (The Pencil Skirt, The Garter Belt, The Corset, The Miniskirt, The Silk Shop) that presumably have some metaphorical reference to the "dialect" of the poems they contained, but merely served as distractions. Instead of each poem standing on its own merits, I found myself trying to translate them from (or into?) the dialect they presumably represented, rarely to good effect. They're like distracting beadwork on an otherwise sexy skirt.

For me, the ultimate test of a book of poetry is the flip test: literally, flipping open to a random page a few times and seeing if the poem I find stands on its own. Happily, Dialect passes that test with flying colors.