Buffalo Girl

by Jessica Q. Stark

In these hybrid poems, Jessica Q. Stark explores her mother’s fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women's bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs, featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes — lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of wildflowers. Several illustrations from old Red Riding Hood children’s books can also be found embedded into these pieces. Juxtaposing the moral implications of Little Red Riding Hood with her mother's photography, Stark creates an image-text conversation that attends to the wolves lurking in the forests of our everyday lives.  Opening the whispered frames around sexuality and sex work, immersed in the unflattering symptoms of survival, Buffalo Girl burgeons with matrilineal love and corporeal rage while censuring the white gaze and the violence enacted through the English language. Here is an inversion of diasporic victimhood. Here is an unwavering attention to the burdens suffered by the women of this world. Here is a reimagination, a reclamation, a way out of the woods.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

126 pages, Unknown Binding

First published April 18, 2023

About the author

Jessica Q. Stark is a poet, educator, and editor that lives in Jacksonville, Florida. Her poetry has most recently appeared in or is forthcoming in The Southeast Review, The Boiler, Pleiades, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, Tupelo Quarterly, Potluck, and for the Glass Poetry Journal: Poets Resist series. Her first poetry manuscript, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for the Double Take Grand Prize in 2016 and was published by Heavy Feather Review. She is the author of three chapbooks including the mini-chapbook, Vasilisa the Wise, that was published by Ethel Zine Press in 2018. Her first full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, which was a finalist for the Norma Farber Award, the CSU Poetry Center's First Book Prize, the Rose Metal Press Hybrid Book Prize, and 42 Miles Press' First Book Award, was published by Birds, LLC in March 2020. She writes poetry reviews for Carolina Quarterly and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She serves currently as a Poetry Editor for AGNI. She holds a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley, an M.A. in English from Saint Louis University's Madrid Campus, and a PhD in English from Duke University. She teaches poetry as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of North Florida.

Reviews

[S. Fey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterclass on cseasuras, parenthesis, and poems with a storyline. Brilliant.

[Connie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unfolding in three parts, Stark’s sophomore full-length collection features prose poems to “liberal erasures” of a variety of Little Red Riding Hood stories. Accompanied by vibrant collages, starring Red Riding Hood illustrations and black-and-white pictures of the writer’s mother, I’ve been propping the book open to images with a pink page holder in my writing space. (Today, I gaze at page 79.) This meditation on fairy tales and flowers, Vietnamese American identity and mother-love, stealing and violence is unforgettable. Beginning with “Against Knowing,” the captivating poem — with its repetition, short lines, and single period at the end — propels the reader forward: “Against naming, too / Against notion, ruling, / circumstantial love”

from “10 Essential Poetry Books by AAPI Authors” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/must-read-poetry...

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection’s threads and themes are ambitious, but also hard to pin down. The animating force is that many of the poems are erasures of versions of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. The appendix is critical since it lays out the full text of the versions, their sources, and the author’s blunt analysis of the morals. The point being that the moral can vary depending on factors and perspectives. Another dominant image is the titular “Buffalo Girl” which seems to be a throw to daring, fun-loving, rule-breaking women—the speaker/author’s mother being one of these. Pictures of her mother in Vietnamese dress and on motorcycles are collages mixed with the aggressive vegetation of Florida. Hybridity and linguistic loss are mentioned a few times, and female figures from Vietnamese legend appear as well. I learned quite a lot from the reading I did in conjunction with the poems, but I don’t believe the collection stands cohesively on its own interpretation. I find I really need the source materials and am grateful for the appendix. I wish there were a narrative through line in places to keep me from getting lost in the woods, as it were.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning poetry collection — highly recommend!

[Shelby · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a lot to love in this pages. I most adore the use of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale in this book. It is such an interesting technique to tell and retell and retell that story interwoven with so much more! I’m also a huge fan of the artwork. You can tell how much heart is in this collection! Thank you so much for this copy BOA Editions!

Synopsis:

Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women's bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs, featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes — lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of wildflowers. Several illustrations from old Red Riding Hood children’s books can also be found embedded into these pieces. Juxtaposing the moral implications of Little Red Riding Hood with her mother's photography, Stark creates an image-text conversation that attends to the wolves lurking in the forests of our everyday lives. 

Opening the whispered frames around sexuality and sex work, immersed in the unflattering symptoms of survival, Buffalo Girl burgeons with matrilineal love and corporeal rage while censuring the white gaze and the violence enacted through the English language. Here is an inversion of diasporic victimhood. Here is an unwavering attention to the burdens suffered by the women of this world. Here is a reimagination, a reclamation, a way out of the woods.

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The whole collection is stunning, but the Little Red Riding Hood erasure poems...whew. Wow. Brilliant, gutting, beautiful.

[Paul Quick · Rating 5 out of 5]

exceptionally creative. Best poetry book ever read.

[WhiskeyintheJar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review

When I began isn't clear, but isn't it obvious that
we always had a knack
for stories about little girls in danger?

Buffalo Girl was the exploring and working through emotions and traumas caused by sexism, racism, war, losing cultural connections, and a mother and daughter relationship in poetic prose. The book was divided into three sections that dealt with the effects of relationships, mother and daughter, mother and father, and outside influences, background on mother's lived experience, and finally the jarring experience of leaving Vietnam and living in America.

Let's find a way out of here
let's take apart the woods

While the prose was poetry, there was also a telling of story through the lens of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. The author draws from the lesson of little girls needing to be wary of wolves and applied it to the dangers her mother faced in Vietnam. While the book mainly deals with the lived experiences of the author and her mother, there was also some historical cultural tie-ins with mentions of the Trung Sisters, Trần Lệ Xuân, and Triệu Thị Trinh (Buffalo Girl), relating to the shared experience of these women throughout the times, the type of violence women experience.

If she couldn't become a new dawn, she'd settle for a buffalo.

Throughout the book there was also collage pictures, made up of the author's mother's old photographs taken, the author's photos of plants and flowers, and drawings of Little Red Riding Hood. I thought the applying of the Little Red fairy tale was an interesting way to explore and comment on societal acceptance and ignoring of violence woman are subjected to and how indoctrination works. My favorite poem was The Furies and a few poem lines about how they were living in America after the Vietnam War and how her mother saw men who would be considered war criminals in Vietnam, being lauded and celebrated as heroes. The anger and pain came through at points, for what the mother lived through and how it caused the author to lose important cultural ties but also the endurance and strength of the author, her mother (her sense of humor), and women in general. Overall, this was an effective artistic expression of loss, pain, anger but also strength and endurance.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a huge poetry person, but after seeing the poet's talk at my library I had to check this one out. I liked the poems as much as I generally like poetry collections -- they're good! I understand like half of them! -- but I really loved the conceit of a series of them. For these, Stark researched various versions of Little Red Riding Hood, summarized them, and then made erasure poems out of the summaries. Something about that connection to a much-loved tale really spoke to me, and, bonus, the summaries are included in the book. Do yourself a favor and make sure to read the summary of "The Grandmother"; it's absolutely wild.

[Blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark is a book that retells a fairy tale. The fairy tale is "Little Red Riding Hood." It is interesting to read and think. about this famous story in a different way. Throughout time children and women have experienced the inner anger of wolves. The "woods" no longer are a safe habitat. There is also the rupture caused by Vietnam. Only so far can we run from these specters of abuse. We must face them like Buffalo Girl one more time each day.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stark invents a stunning collection of grief, maternal lineage, and self within these poems.

"that sensation between choking and uncontrollable, heaving laughter / at the very thing that controls you and your body and your mother's body and / my sisters -- my dear sisters -- we always had laughter for our bodies that kept / planting deeper into the woods"

[Carrie George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hybrid book of my dreams! Mixing erasures of fairy tales with photo collage, this book is a force of family history and the “morals” young girls learn traversing a dangerous world of wolves and flowers.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars

An uneven collection, although the middle section was particularly strong. I think Stark leans a little too heavily on her references/concepts and I didn't get quite enough of an emotional throughline. I will say that I loved the photo collages though!

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faves: “On Passing”, “Impact Sport”, “My Mother Reads Me Little Red Riding Hood as a Young Girl”, “The Furies”
Beautiful illustrations of the people we keep in memory and the people we cut out. Also I didn’t realize the original little red stories were that fucked up

[Sonora Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

[Darian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these poems! I think a lot of young girls could empathize with her experiences

[Fiona Howes · Rating 4 out of 5]

some really really interesting ideas in this collection

[Tessyohnka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost too much for me -- a stunning collection.

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but nothing really stood out to me

[Ashley : bostieslovebooks]

(Sealey Challenge Day 14)

[Scarllet ✦ iamlitandwit · Rating 3 out of 5]

And everything even absence
leaves a trace within the body.
And everyone even truth
is their own version of memory.

3.5/4 stars <3