Winner of the Barrow Street Press 2007 book prize judged by Carl Phillips, Boy With Flowers, Shipley’s debut collection, presents a stunning and unsolvable matrix of childhood, gender, and perception. Like shadow puppets on the wall, the words and objects of these poems continually morph into new and surprising shapes, questioning what is truly being looked at, seen, and felt. On ground that is constantly moving, one can never feel definitively safe, or decide which contrasting images are real: those of the external world, or those of the internal.
Through imagery that constantly enfolds and cloaks, the stanzas in Shipley’s poems often function like nets: casting, entrapping, cataloguing, keeping or letting go. Except the boon is often a mystery, or even something more sinister, as is the environment that surrounds the narrator. The poems are metaphorically flush with the elements of nature—their inability to be controlled, and the ways we simultaneously resist them yet shape ourselves into them.
Control, or its lack, figures largely into the book as a whole. Repeatedly, the reader is confronted with issues of access, what can be touched and what is beyond reach. How to keep things protected and safe in a world so permeable, where sound or smoke or rain could drift in at any moment. The instances of tactile success—when something is indeed felt, received—have a thrilling beauty, as in the poem “A Farmhouse,” where snow becomes “one thick / ribbon of winter, cold in my palm.”
The transgendered narrative of Boy With Flowers often goes back to memories of childhood in a search to find the locus of identity. Items of the everyday trigger flashbacks of years before, like buttons on an elevator, so that at any point readers may find themselves taken back in time to the narrator’s upbringing: it is always there waiting and can pull back at any moment to a place whose beauty or pain—there’s no predicting which—will render one helpless with memory.
In Boy With Flowers, the world and all its objects is an unlimited surface in which to see oneself and attempt an identity through images that are often skewed, upside-down or misleading. How, then, to create one’s image so that it is true? “Balloons” speaks of organs as paint rendered on paper; “Now each canvas is / a lung hung in a single body, exhaling / green to red, blue to gold.” Above all there is the warning knowledge that hiding or altering one’s image is not a route to safety; poems such as “Magnolia,” and “At the Carnival” make mention of masks and their failure to protect.
The book’s title poem takes flawless and breathtaking leaps in time, beginning with a self-identified boy asked to dress up like a flower girl for an aunt’s wedding and moving to stitched-up incisions on a chest, “each a naked stem, flaming with thorns.” As felt in this sentence, beauty and violence intermingle truthfully throughout Boy With Flowers: descriptions of a kiss and a car accident can be nearly identical. The power and motion of the book is ultimately fueled by the juxtaposition of the vulnerable against the dangerous. Like a telescope, the poems cause the threats of life, many and real, to come into focus, exposing how defenseless all existence really is.