Girlhood Illuminated: A Review of Olivia Gatwood’s “New American Best Friend”
by Anna Szilagyi
New American Best Friend, Olivia Gatwood’s debut poetry collection, lives in adolescence. It lives in the bathroom with your childhood best friend guiding a razor over your leg, in your middle school health class, at a yoga session with Long Island women arguing in their thick New York accents. Published by Button Poetry on March 28th, 2017, New American Best Friend holds poems readers may recognize from Button Poetry’s YouTube channel and from literary magazines, but they have not met this collection as a cohesive, bubblegum-chewing, bitch face–owning force.
Gatwood’s chapbook is brimming with moments and images that cause the reader to exhale, “You too?” under their breath. “Like Us” begins, “I had perfected the story before telling it–/ rehearsed it during imagined interviews in the shower. . . ” about the speaker’s first kiss. Before that, though, a quote from Marie Howe’s “Practicing” (admittedly, one of my favorite poems in the universe), sets a prophecy of what is to come: “. . .and we grew up and hardly mentioned/ who the first kiss really was–a girl like us,/ still sticky with moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom.” Both poets bring to the page these memories dissolved in the dreams of tween sleepovers, the exploring of bodies and not-yet-known sexuality considered so taboo by our parents and teachers and any adult in our vicinity. Like Howe, Gatwood describes this stumbling into early sexuality as ceremonious, not shameful.
Gatwood illuminates these isolated childhood and adolescent experiences that both shame and the distance of the memories prevent us from speaking about. In a recording by SlamFind of “Ode to my Bitch Face,” Gatwood begins, “So, I’ve been doing this thing lately where I write odes to things I think I’m supposed to feel ashamed of.” In this poem, “resting bitch face” is not an excuse or an apology, but a “pink armor, lipstick rebel/ steel cheeked, slit mouth/ head to the ground, mean girl,” a defense against gender-based harassment, paired with keys between fingers.
Not only in the odes that close the book–to the word “pussy,” to period underwear, to wedding dresses in Goodwill–but all throughout New American Best Friend, Gatwood takes a sword to shame by writing, speaking, and conjuring stories of growth and girlhood as she experienced it. The first time trying a tampon, moving to another country, the disbanding of a relationship– all of the stories are threaded together with quotes from different poets, each section opening a door to another era of Gatwood’s life. She celebrates these memories, not by pretending they were easy or fun or happy, but by mapping them out in the language of present-day Olivia Gatwood, both reflecting on these scenes from her current perspective and living in them as she did then.
Part of the book’s magic–and poetry’s magic–is that the poems have multiple homes. To listen to Gatwood’s Long Island accent when she performs “An Ode to the Women on Long Island” is to add another layer of depth and sweetness to its characters, and to read the poem is to trace again and again the familiar words and stanzas. These worlds will not leave readers’ minds easily–the dead grass on the golf course, the corn soup in Port of Spain, the long hairs tangled in the carpet–Gatwood artfully curates the museum of her girlhood and adolescence, lingering in the in-betweens.
Anna Szilagyi is an editor by trade and a recent graduate of Binghamton University, where she studied English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Feminine Inquiry, Luna Luna Magazine, The Fem, and elsewhere. She uses her lipstick as a mood ring and spends her train commutes buried in feminist fiction and poetry. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @