Keen
Lauren Gordon
Chapbook
Horse Less Press 2015
Review by Fox Frazier-Foley
Lauren Gordon’s chapbook Keen (Horse Less Press, 2014) is inevitably attractive to those of us who grew up reading Nancy Drew mysteries. These poems are at once unforgiving, playful, inventive, and interrogative, and to experience them is to re-read said mysteries with a certain amount of fond nostalgia, even as we re-read our younger selves—those versions of us who once absorbed these stories less critically.
For, in tandem with its playful nature, Gordon’s scrutinizing gaze provides an illumination of some of the tropes these books carried: the classism, sexism, ableism, and racism inherent in their presentation. It reminds us, gently but incisively, that the original Nancy Drew was a demure, even-tempered young lady with “titian hair” and blue eyes, from a white, upper-middle class, suburban home. She never got into any kind of moral trouble: she socialized almost exclusively with her two best friends (one a dark-haired, no-nonsense tomboy, one a curvy blonde), and maintained a chaste-but-devoted romance with her steady boyfriend, Ned — to whom we are introduced here in delightfully barbed terms:
Ned will say he doesn't see a thing. Ned will hide the key under a
statuette, carefully palming her ceramic tit. Ned will insert the tape.
Ned, in the original mystery books, was a device who let readers know Nancy was both respectable and desirable: she could keep a man, and she wasn’t the flighty or questionable sort of girl who had many beaus, went on too many dates, or gave anyone reason to question her purity. Here, Ned is still identified as her partner, but he’s also revealed as part of the social fabric that limits Nancy’s identity and actions. He lies to Nancy, ostensibly for her own good. He touches an inanimate statute in ways he is not allowed to touch Nancy. He commits the only act of penetration he can without defiling her honor.
Nancy, meanwhile, is a character who maintains her demure lifestyle, while frequently eluding “swarthy-skinned” assailants. This persistent undercurrent of racism in the original mystery books is addressed in Gordon’s poems with a biting wit in Chapter 4, which features Nancy being seated at breakfast and placing an order—a satiric nod to her bubble of bourgeois, well-manicured obliviousness:
wait to be seated for breakfast place your order before slipping a nail under the envelope's seam -- what proofs. Your girlfriend has rescued a darling little Indian boy named Tom Sleepy Dear Smith and he wants your money for books. In a jocular vein, you forgot how to be racist for a moment when the bread arrived.
What proofs, indeed. The clues here are not only slivers of whatever mystery currently preoccupies Nancy, they’re clues about what she represents, and to whom. Gordon’s satire is biting, and well-earned. And it’s perhaps a paradoxical relief that it doesn’t let up.
The second part of the book emphasizes the absence of a mother figure; by dwelling on the concept of the late Mrs. Drew’s will, Gordon casts Nancy at once in the light of her mother’s legacy and lack of presence. “To my daughter, I bequeath nothing,” reads the main text of Article 5, and here Gordon strikes a chord: Nancy’s mother left her with an absence, with a void, a “nothing”—and it is this inherited void that shapes the daughter’s identity in ways that the original mystery books seem to gloss over. The mother’s loss is not a life-changing tragedy, but a loss that almost seems to facilitate a joyous sense of freedom and independence. In Gordon’s hands, it becomes an impetus. The poems in the second part of the chapbook remind us that Nancy Drew was, in the act of solving mystery after mystery, constantly in the act of seeking truth. Her life was essentially an intriguing series of obstacles and obfuscations:
I made myself get up, get ugly
when I should have been sleeping
or nursing, should have been sterilizing
your bottles [. . .]
I should have pulled back the drapery
to find what you hid there, should have put a padlock
on the trapdoor in your bedroom. That is how the devil
came into the house, could come and go like electricity.
Use your flashlight in the darkness.
The mother, moving like a ghost through the house, sees that evil was allowed in by the apertures she left. Her presence is not there to ensure her infant daughter’s safety. Her final words to Nancy are a command to seek certainty and truth, using the light she herself holds when her world has not been properly lit for her. In this way, Gordon lights on perhaps the one way in which Nancy Drew was not as privileged as she might have been. She was always more of a device—a mystery-solving robot who propels the plot forward but never has a truly bad moment, makes a markedly poor life choice, or is allowed a major moral mistake. These poems, in that way, deliver Nancy a second chance at her intended audience, and at selfhood. And yet, we are never quite free of the robot—the anthropomorphic character who is pre-programmed, obviously limited, and meticulous in the artifice of her creation. It is Gordon’s triumph that these poems mine that lack towards greater insight.
Fox Frazier-Foley is a Vodou initiate who hails from upstate New York and northern Virginia. Her poetry chapbook, Exodus in X Minor, was selected by Beth Couture as winner of the Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, and her first full-length poetry collection, The Hydromantic Histories, was chosen by Chard deNiord as winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Prize. She is Editor-Curator of TheThe Infoxicated Corner at TheThe Poetry Blog, and a creator and Managing Editor of the small, Los Angeles-based press Ricochet Editions. She writes poetry horoscopes for Luna Luna Magazine.