Girl in Two Pieces

Poetry. Elizabeth Hatmaker has a quiet way of crunching up our world. She excels in shaking out the dirty little corners of the mind, particularly the mind of misogynist history. In the person of Elizabeth Short, the so-called 'Black Dahlia, ' she has found her heroine, the way Leonard Cohen found Joan of Arc--or perhaps how Raymond Queneau found Zazie in the métro--for in Girl we see Elizabeth Short refracted and perfected through multiple stylistic prisms and processes. The matter of the Black Dahlia is, of course, gigantic, but Hatmaker has it all in the palm of her hand, and locates the world's pain and hope and justice in the figure of her girl in two pieces. Hatmaker is an exquisite writer, and better than that, she cares about something--the life and death of a lost girl--something tiny yet immense--Dodie Bellamy.