Mary Carroll-Hacket's The Real Politics of Lipstick: A Review by Amy Whipple

At night, I read these memories like the finger-worn pages of my favorite childhood Mother Goose book.   These memories are barefoot and covered in the first good sweat of late spring.   Southern front porches and long green lawns.   And books.   So many books and so much writing and all of the very many sun-tinted memories of being in the right place at the right time with all of the right people.

***

We are in the reception room post-reading.   It’s junior year of undergrad, and my friend Walter points into a jumble of people toward a woman with big, black hair.   “That’s Mary Carroll-Hackett,” he says.   “She’s the new creative writing professor.   I’m doing an independent study with her.”

He does not even have to finish the sentence before I am wildly, incomprehensibly jealous.   In the English department, we have two options—literature and education.   Longwood University is a small school in the middle of nowhere.   Wal-Mart is a viable entertainment option.   The appearance of this woman, you need to know, is huge.

When I meet Mary, I’m assistant editor of the (questionable in quality) school paper.   I do journalism because I’ve always done journalism; it comes easily.   In the previous years I had tucked away creative writing, but in the months that follow our introduction she draws that back out—for me and for the many students across the campus who feel a needy reticence about loving an art so impractical.

I quit the newspaper.

Longwood is historically a teacher’s college: practical, practical, practical.   It’s in this environment that Mary builds a program for the working writer.   No promises of fame or a blast onto the bestseller list.   Just a promise that, if you want it and work for it, you can make yourself a life of letters.

I begin reading for the fledgling Dos Passos Review.   Mary has a group of interns who are quickly dubbed her minions.   They fill her small office and fall out into the hall.   I distinguish myself from them because I don’t officially work for her; she allows for this.   She also allows for my many neuroses.   So I stay crazy, and I work hard.   She gives me more.   I work harder.   I learn the many important hidden needs of a literary journal, of starting a press, of being part of an academic department, of teaching, of life beyond the classroom.

Graduation looms near, and Mary convinces me and four others to be the starter class for the concentration in creative writing at the graduate level.   That day, it’s raining and chilly and everyone’s huddled under the overhang that stretches in front of the English building’s front doors.   I am so scared I could puke.   She tells me to jump.

The next two years are a tumble of reading, writing, and crazy.   Mary is encouraging and demanding.   Tough love.   I trust her.   I become her graduate assistant, attend some conferences, present at some conferences, co-found a conference, and have one of the best nights in my life at the release party for the inaugural winner of the Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry.   Liam, Mary’s own fierce mentor, calls us his grandstudents.   The feeling of being part of a literary family—and knowing exactly who to thank for the often magical life I’m leading—is as warm as the Southern spring night.

Though there was a definitive line between the most private parts of Mary’s life and what she shared with us, there was still room for her insecurities and frustrations, for her worries and hopes.   I listened and I read: poems and flash fiction that she e-mailed or handed over on folded pieces of printer paper.   Somewhere in that second year, a character emerged in pieces.   A scene from childhood.   Prayers in Latin.   Recipes.   I don’t know what this is, she said.   But it came with urgency.

At the beginning of the summer, I graduated and moved to Pittsburgh.   She listened patiently as I cried through many months.   At the end of the summer, Liam died.   The world felt split open.   Like all important moments in life, I learned without instruction how to listen for someone who was similarly learning her way through grief.

I don’t know when the space between us became so solid.   It wasn’t right after that summer or even in the year that followed.   Not even the next.   I know it felt like permanence when her book, The Real Politics of Lipstick, won Slipstream’s annual chapbook contest in 2010.   In another life, I would have known the entry, the result, seen the galleys and the cover design.   Would have done a happy dance in the office or in front of the building.   I would have been given a copy from the stack in her office.

But in this life, I saw the string of congratulations on her Facebook wall.   Saw the comments from people about how beautiful the cover turned out.   I ordered the book for myself from Slipstream‘s website last August.   And, for a time, let it sit on the coffee table unread, as if not reading would mean that nothing had actually changed.

***

The Real Politics of Lipstick is categorized as poetry, but the thirty pieces it contains truly exist in the ghost world of prose poems and flash fiction.   Mary writes in the long, breathless sentences that read like a Southern promise.   The prose itself is sometimes the only comfort in these glimpses into an aching life.   If the woman in many of the poems is not the woman from those long ago pieces I used to read in Mary’s office, then these are certainly other women, other men, who inhabit that same world.

The book opens with an image used more than once throughout the collection—the lips of a woman and the power of learning to control them.   This is a young woman in the presence of older men:

that ice cream cone a weapon that she wielded easily by the age of fourteen, the sweet cream of it deliberately left on the cushion of her bottom lip as she watched them stare, sweat, shift away from their wives.

Watching this woman shifting onto her knees is to watch the intricate balance of power—and what sometimes only looks like power.   He will yield to her for his pleasure, but she will also do the leaving out of vulnerability.   There is so much loss, so much mourning for people in the everyday items of tobacco leaves, pliers, and stockings.   Even the food that appears through many of the pieces bubbles with hurt: regional funereal food, apologetic breakfasts, and politics in red lentils.

This is a world, mostly Southern, mostly working, where there is more hurt than anything else.   As children play with homemade bottle rockets,

parents who cleaned buildings or worked in factories then came back to rows of singlewides, people canned and sharp as tomatoes in coastal summer heat, pressure cooked by whether the lights or the phone or the broken-down Ford came first in the doling out of paychecks.

“The Marine at the Bowling Alley” is no less vulnerable than the baby girl he holds tight between frames:

he smells soap and powder and the hint of the milk from his wife’s young breasts, and he breathes in that smell, knowing he has ninety days, only eight-nine now, before he’s back in the middle of the night, on a dusty airfield, watching the better part of a battalion of Marines packed up and ready to go home after six months in al-Anbar.

The Marine has the power of being a man, the power of being a soldier who has been to war.   But he’s equally powerless, lost in the nerve-raw images of what no one in that bowling alley can understand.

I want to say that The Real Politics of Lipstick ends too soon after forty scant pages, but I’m not sure.   The slim volume is emotionally exhausting and works best in small doses.   It’s worth reading all the way through for the snaps of life in small Southern towns, for the texture as rough as the sand and loblolly pines of Eastern North Carolina.   Leave time, though, to sit in the resonating ache, which doubles for each poem you read.

***

A favorite axiom from Mary’s workshops: “if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.”   Just because something exists in your writerly mind doesn’t mean you’ve done the work for the reader to see it.   How different the texture of a piece, though, when you as a reader know more than what’s on the page.

It’s one thing to cherish the inside joke embedded in a friend’s short story or to spot trivia smudged in a favorite author’s poem—a moment that nods to a diary enter or a letter or an incident captured by a biographer.   Both highlight differing sides of intimacy.   But to read the current work of a mentor is another experience entirely.   While there are the personal moments in the relationship akin to friendship, there’s also the barrier between adult and child, between teacher and student.   Reading a mentor’s work exposes matters of the heart often left unknown to a mentee.   And to read the work of a receding/former mentor is to read both a scrapbook of the moments you once shared and to journey into an unknown (unknowable?) place.   You were here, so many of the poems seem to say, but now you’re not.

When Mary and I talked for the first time in half a year, I said all the things I would have said in another time and another place, but the sentiment felt off, maybe bordering on insincere, though I know it wasn’t.   It couldn’t be.

The Real Politics of Lipstick is available now from Slipstream

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Amy Whipple will complete the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh in April and is currently seeking suggestions for the best cities in which to be homeless.