But She is Also Jane by Laura Read

Book Review by Abby N. Lewis

Laura Read explores the microaggressions of sexism and the ripples caused by a patriarchal history. In her poem “American Realism,” she tells the story of an older man on the subway whose pants fell down when he stood up. Though the intention was harmless and the older man was largely oblivious to what was happening, the episode was still traumatizing “[b]ecause exposing the body can be an act / of violence.”

This is the essence of Read’s collection, But She is Also a Jane: the small moments, the almost-forgettable incidents that hardly register as something worthy of making a fuss about. But the world is filled with them, and women encounter them nearly every day. From the faculty meeting where the speaker must wait patiently with her hand up for longer than she needs to just to be called on to speak by a man in “Phallogocentric” to becoming a cheerleader in high school because it is a role women are taught to desire, Read dissects the nuances of the performance of gender and the learned and instinctual rules of the game.

Read opens her collection with an epigraph from Plath’s The Bell Jar that reads, “My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.” Much like the protagonist of The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, is much like Plath herself, the speaker of many of Read’s poems could be Read herself, though asserting that the speaker is always Read is to ruin the illusion, to force a solution onto a discussion of a problem for which there is no solution, or at least not one that sticks. Rather, the work lies in discussing the problem. 

In many of the poems in the collection, the speaker mentions how much she defined her youth by the boy she was dating, or the boy she wanted to date, or the boy who she wanted to want to date her, or the boy who just broke up with her. But, in “Fleur de Lis,” the speaker comes to a realization. In the poem, the speaker is at a wedding,

dancing with my boyfriend who was realizing
he didn’t want to marry me.
I didn’t want to marry him either
though I would have
because I never know what I want or don’t want
until it’s too late.

In one way, this is a confession of a character trait (indecision), but in another, it is the baring of how women are painted as receivers, as statues that must accept what is given and go along with what is offered without taking and without speaking up. Read makes this even clearer later in the poem when a friend stands up to defend the speaker against the approaches of a man; it is the friend who is being assertive, but it is the speaker who stays silent and still, afraid (or trained) to freeze like a deer during confrontation. Because deer, when still, are invisible. The poem “Deer are the obvious stand-ins for the dead” expands on this as well. Deer are the idea symbol because of

the way they stop only for a moment
to look in your eyes in that way
it takes a whole lifetime to find

and the way you know they are about
to go.

Abby N. Lewis (MA, East Tennessee State University) is the poet of the full-length collection Reticent, the chapbook This Fluid Journey, and the newly released chapbook Palm Up, Fingers Curled from Plan B Press in May 2023. She writes frequent book reviews for Chapter 16, and she can be found at: freeairforfish.com.