Urban Decay

Abstract

Urban Decay Andrea Scarpino (bio) Small Enterprise Mary Biddinger Black Lawrence Press www.blacklawrence.com/small-enterprise/ 95 Pages; Print, $13.95 Dedicated “For the cities we left behind,” Mary Biddinger’s fifth poetry collection, Small Enterprise, is both celebration and remembrance of urban life, especially for those who came of age as our most prominent American cities began their decline. Fans of Biddinger’s work will recognize her crisply written lines and surprising imagery, her ability to make strange the seemingly ordinary, and her undermining of the very narrative threads she creates. They also will recognize her wit and the hint of danger simmering beneath an ordinary Christmas dinner, high school football game, or group of grandmothers sitting on their front stoops. The speakers of these poems are the cool kids with their snappy comebacks we wish we could have been. But they also are fragile, haunted, damaged. They live scary and troubled lives filled with trips to the emergency room and potentially dangerous men. And in that, they create a world we recognize as ours even as it disappears beneath us. Through a series of 21 “Risk Management Memo” poems woven throughout Small Enterprise, Biddinger builds a haunting backbone to her collection that reveals the danger and risk of seemingly mundane subjects like community outreach and working in a restaurant’s dish room. The title poem of the collection, “Risk Management Memo: Small Enterprise,” includes the film Apocalypse Now (1979), an imaginary racehorse named Look Loveable, a memory of curdled cider poured into the speaker’s hair after she was buried at camp, and a “you” who wants to drown before turning twenty. The final three stanzas read: I met you at the gun house. Somebodyhad put new curtains up, but nothing could take away the head-markson the walls. Our entire city becamea place that turned its back on coffee, even marzipan ducklings. There’sa reason everyone loves the samethings. That reason will never be you. As is typical of the collection, Biddinger writes in first person and includes an unidentified “you.” As is also typical, warning simmers just beneath the poem’s surface. Even though someone has tried to make the house presentable with new curtains, the “head-marks/on the walls” give away the violence—and/or sex—that defines the place, which we assume is abandoned and has thus become a teenage hotspot. But the speaker is self-assured even as she reminds herself to “look loveable” for the “you”; she ends with a searing indictment of his/her place in her life and in their larger city. This tension between self-questioning and self-assuredness reverberates throughout Small Enterprise; even when these poems’ speakers take unthinkable risks, they are hip to the many ways life will ruin them. For example, in the poem, “Risk Management Memo: Wear and Tear,” Biddinger writes, “I want to be new again / so I can do all the same things / again” and “it was back // when we were magnificent, or / didn’t know otherwise.” In the poem “Breach Year,” Biddinger writes, “The world does not need any more music / or teenagers. My life was not hard // so I made it hard.” And in “Risk Management Memo: Community Outreach,” she writes, “But I was past the candy age, and this / was a colder sort of country.” And that is one of the collection’s strengths: even in its most innocent moments, it also manages to be impossibly wise and far-sighted, reminding us that loss is continual, that even as we build what we hold most dear, it is crumbling around us. As Biddinger writes in “Beatitudes,” “I demonstrate hope. / Or the hope for hope. Or just more unanswerable holes.” This tension between creation and destruction, between hope and “unanswerable holes,” is another theme of poems that touch on writing and the role of the artist, the identity formation of young adulthood, and the collapse of so many of our neighborhoods. Indeed, the best poems in Small Enterprise surprise the reader into seeing our shifting urban landscapes in new and unexpected ways. In a field overgrown with what is being called “ruin...