Girl on a Bridge
Suzanne Frischkorn
Main Street Rag Press
ISBN Number: 978-1-59948-226-2

Reviewer: Alice Osborn


          From the title alone, you know that Girl on a Bridge will probably involve danger, personal transition, or perhaps lost youth. Suzanne Frischkorn's second poetry collection contains many of these standard elements, yet so much more. Frischkorn challenges the weighty assumption of what "a girl on a bridge" suggests beyond the usual Hollywood-esque suicide thoughts or coming of age scenarios. The subjects in her poems are everyday girls and women who are dealing with complicated relationships from their past or their present. These are women who have sex, deal with grief, and struggle with their emotions. Frischkorn exposes the women’s complexities in a sometimes not so flattering light, and by doing so never relies on clichés. Several of these poems also feature pregnancy and motherhood depicted poignantly from fresh angles. In fact, almost all of the poems in this collection invite surprise and multiple reads to ensure that meaning is encountered on as many layers as possible.

          Frischkorn is a Connecticut girl and this state, along with New Jersey and New York, is where many of her poems live. While Connecticut can be considered urban, it also provides Frischkorn much inspiration in terms of rivers, farmland, maple trees, and, of course, bridges. She also upends the notion of what nice girls should do or look like in “Great Lash,” which models itself closely to Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool.”

We cut school and watched Foxes
We cut school and drank vodka.
We cut school and got stoned,
did our makeup, walked the streets.

          In the titular poem, "The Girl on a Bridge," Frischkorn plays with the title's expectations by opening her poem with this line: "—And she tossed the red beret/ into the Seine turning her back/ on Paris forever. No she didn't." By acknowledging the image of the 1999 French movie by the same name, she's free to go off to Greenwich, Connecticut, which she does:

—She was on a bridge
overlooking the Mianus.
Yes, with 95 South behind her.
She wore a blue ski cap
and a black pea coat. She looked

over—peered actually—and
turned around to hitch a ride
to the Kit Kat Club on NYC's
East Side. That's the kind of
girl she was. A straight shooter,
a go getter—not some freak
throwing good money away.

          Frischkorn's evocative use of enjambment between stanzas propels the reader, making her feel as if she’s the one being pushed off a bridge. This poem, as is the case with so many of Frischkorn’s, is short, tells a complete story, and lets the reader take an imaginative leap.

          There’s not so much a leap in “Bees” as there is a sharp turn in the last line, which offers a universal ly accessible experience. We’ve all been told hurtful things about our bodies from people we look up to. We then take what they say and believe it’s true when it’s not.

“Bee stings,”
he called
the bumps
under my t-shirt.

I had a crush
on Roger—
his blue eyes,
his blond hair.

That day
on my porch steps
wrecked my posture forever.

          The poems in which Frischkorn describes her father’s violence and the lack of a safe zone while growing up are some of the most powerful in the collection. In “Sister,” the speaker, who is five, sees her older sister escape a violent household, while she is told by her mother that “in families like ours the healthiest person leaves,” an explanation which certainly doesn’t help the situation.

          As a child, she can’t verbalize her frustration and sadness, which are felt in her body. Not one to let an image-opportunity go to waste, Frischkorn transforms this sentiment into a closed “seam” since, as a child, she lacked a way to express herself.

I want to remind my mother that at five there is nowhere
            to go, but my mouth

(full of coppery blood from biting my tongue)
            is sewn tight with a gleam of steel and nylon thread—

the seams about to bust.

          Towards the end of the collection, Frischkorn revisits her violent household in “Suspended,” which makes use of a bridge metaphor and the repeating image of a mouth. But this time, she incorporates her son into the piece, who is more defiant than his mother was.

If I could go back and swallow my tongue…
Would my son have stayed in his room
instead of climbing out the window
not a star or moon to guide him?
Gone until we notice. We notice the quiet.

          At this point in the poem, she employs anaphora (“this one”) to emphasize the weight of her past and the historical motif of absent fathers:

I count and match them to my sins
—this one for the time I ran away to Chicago
—this one for staying out all night,
—this one for pushing my mother,
And this one and this one.
This one for thinking his father
was a safe haven, a respite, a man.

          Maple leaves, chicken eggs, and a venerable sex manual all press together in “The Joy of Sex,” which describes two young friends witnessing a couple, Lila and George, who happen to be one girl’s brother and the other girl’s sister, having sex. The last image of transformation effectively contrasts a hard, scraping image with a softer one:

We watch rock grind Lila’s spine
and splinter her tailbone. The petal
shaped bruises, inside her pale thighs,
will bloom tomorrow.

          Whenever a writer introduces the symbolism of bridges into her or his writing, the reader automatically turns to how bridges can symbolize change, passage, and conflict. They can also serve as a monument to the past or the future. This is mostly how Frischkorn makes use of her bridge references, letting them stand in for her past and her subjects’ pasts, as they become proxies for the stored-up feelings that must now be released. Using clear language and accessible images, Frishkorn is at her best when she employs specific details in such a way as to conjure the complexity of change, doing so in a way to which almost any reader can relate.