Deborah Woodard’s Borrowed Tales

Not fan fiction, not persona poems, not capsule biography, and never just collage, Deborah Woodard’s beautifully confusing, densely charming collection draws on all of those genres nonetheless. Her long, sometimes ungainly lines and off-balance sentences explore slices and moments, memories and oblique views of people real and fictive: a friend who served in the Peace Corps and wrote letters home; a teenage diarist fleeing LA; Ophelia and Hamlet; graffiti writers (“Tags covered what they did not own, if all / went well”); pregnant teens and their teachers at the (real) Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit; a deaf man unjustly confined in a North Carolina asylum. The poems become facets of each person, pieces of lives we never encounter whole.

That means that the poems do something odd indeed, or rather that they do two things in an odd combination: they present characters, and they grate and scrape against the idea that we can come to know all of a person, that we can explain all somebody’s actions and know that person as a whole. Instead, Woodard’s elaborations say, there’s more to anybody, even to fictional characters, than we can understand. Her poems based on Hamlet are mysteries in the best way, like long-forgotten, partially legible letters from summer camp; to wit, sometimes their protagonists sound like teens. “Ghosts just want to talk it out,” Woodard explains to (or perhaps in the voice of) Ophelia. “She seemed really young / for her glasses. Do you like my poems? she asked. Her birdsong tugged at me.” Horatio, on the other hand, tries to imagine adulthood: “Dude, you drank it away,” he begins, but then produces a figure for maturity: “We keep getting simpler so, in the end, we don’t have to be. We get furry, put out leafy tips.”

The budding tree and the dudely bro could both be Horatio, but not the same Horatio; they coexist incompatibly in our imaginations, just as incompatible personae, incompatible ways of acting, also come together in real people’s lives. As Horatio is one way in one production, another in another, so I am one person with my mom, another with my children, two others with two sets of friends.

Woodard favors long, unmetrical lines that put sentence shape first; at their weakest they sound like prose. (A few poems use short lines instead.) Her notes explain that she began these poems by...