GLASS TOWN

'American girlhood, with its anorexia and Girl Scout merit badges, piano recitals and razored self-mutilations, is the shattered 'glass town' of Lisa Russ Spaar's magical poems. Setting out to 'heal the old rifts-- / heaven and earth, girl / and dream,' Spaar records the rituals of a tribe we recognize chiefly by its fierce determination to survive-girls, bent first on perfection, then, on returning from the banishment of our preoccupation with their bodies, their beauty. What a marvel this book is! In language that manages to be both ardent and elegant, Spaar gives witness to marvelous mythologies in which the old story: / the world for my body, / my body for the world, is cancelled in a moment s reckoning, and Rapunzel saves herself. Dorothy Barresi