Tori Grant Welhouse
Judge’s Comments:
Vaginas Need Air by Tori Grant Welhouse. Welhouse has a great gift for narrative and for description which she uses to take the reader directly into her childhood, an era of Dippity-do and Pontiacs, when mothers had bouffants, fathers had crewcuts and boyfriends wore turtlenecks. But this is not a nostalgic book: it is a clear-eyed and passionate elegy to her salty and iconoclastic mother who "strides the shag carpet in her pincurls/and drifting cigarette," giving her little girls Tonka trucks and painting their nails bubblegum pink, advising them on sex ("a woman needs to claim her pleasure") and on feminine hygiene ("vaginas need air"), while talking them out of burning their bras ("you will thank me one day"). Wellhouse's mother is depicted navigating the turbulence between the domestic '60s and the revolutionary '70s, and this larger perspective brings poignance to the poems. At one point Welhouse asks, noticing her mother is still in her nightgown in the middle of the day, ". . . who is she? And why is she so sad?/And what more does she want?" In the end, the reader becomes nearly as infatuated with her mother as Welhouse is--wishing to hear her "singular laughter carrying over the trees." The book employs the post-confessional style of Sharon Olds, Dorianne Laux and Susan Browne, free verse poems in a variety of styles made memorable by an ear for sound and an eye for vivid events.
