Customer Reviews

Wild One

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Lucille Lang Day's "Wild One" is a wonderful, frequently hilarious exploration of the life of a woman who refuses to let the world dictate to her. This "autobiography in verse" traces the poet's life from 1954 to the present. Married and pregnant at fourteen, Day shoplifts, quits school, undergoes various encounters with men, marries two more times (twice to the same man), goes back to school, has two daughters, an abortion, experiences severe depression, takes LSD, converts to Judaism, tries out different ways of dealing with the world. A woman, she tells her daughter, "is born twice": "the first / person she gives birth to / is herself." But the self is continually changing. Day's book documents a constantly expanding awareness of the world in which she functions. Finally, she will be satisfied by nothing less than the universe itself. "Wild One" is not so much a book about "coming-of-age" as it is a book about a confusing, tumultuous life which both amuses and baffles the author. Day seems constantly to be asking, "Why ever did I do that?" One of its great strengths is her keen awareness of paradox and contradiction. Even at thirteen, she knew that "bad" seemed "good." "Wild One" is like one of the answers Day fantasizes giving to her Ph.D. qualifying exam: "We want," she writes, "to map the cobwebby brain"; "The universe folds on itself." Probing, wondering, testing, "folding on themselves," her poems do the same thing.