Review: Wanting It Carly Szabo Wanting It Diana Whitney Poetry Harbor Mountain Press Cost: $15.00 |
More than a mere assortment of poems, this book reads more like a memoir exploring such issues as gender roles and self-identity. Divided into four sections, each speaks to a different time in the author’s life and the inner struggles she faces at each milestone. “Watched Pot,” the first of these sections, details the author’s life as a free-spirited young woman exploring her sexuality and what it means to be a member of the female gender. The honesty in her revelations is at times harrowing as it reaches into the hearts of her readers to establish a connection they may have never realized existed. She details her changing definition of feminism as one who freely gives her body away to “city mouse and country mouse” (Peckerville) alike to her realization that there is more to being a woman than entertaining the male gaze. This changing definition has a push and pull effect on the reader, causing them to fluctuate along with the author. Whitney uses the nature surrounding her farm town as a means to communicate her confusion. The readers feel the author’s confusion about her own understanding of what it means to be a woman through her inability to subscribe to one definition of feminism and womanhood, just as the nature surrounding her is unable to subscribe to just one season.