I’ve read Ellyn Maybe’s book The Cowardice of Amnesia three times now. On the book jacket (I’m always critical of book jacket hype) Eileen Myles says that “Ellyn Maybe is the best poet on her side of the country.” That’s a large order of fries. It also sets high expectations for reading. These are poems that you can read again and again. Ellyn claims to write with a “stream of consciousness style” which bombards you with images and references. I tend to put her sentences into my mouth to disolve like pieces of chocolate. Take a simple line like “He’s like a new kind of cramp” from the poem “The Dysfunctional Secular Serenity Prayer.” You break down what that means, like chocolate breaks down with saliva. Taste becomes thought. You reach for another line like popping another caramel into your mouth. “Cupid’s Geiger counter spins volcanoes through my hair,” she writes.Mmmm, you think.
 Ellyn Maybe’s voice alternates between the lack of confidence low self-image persona to a powerful angry shout. Themes like her virginity and the stigma of being fat recur throughout the book. 

“So while others had beauty/and some had grace/and some had significant history/and some had dance partners/I got my attention being a/she-could-lose-it-all-at-any-moment caricature/of a tormented suicidal girl out of time.”

Maybe’s work is also very political. Shouts to free Leonard Peltier, stop insane wars and quell the objectification of women resound through the text. Ellyn Maybe’s work is so vast and complex that it compels you to come back to it again and again, like your favorite movie. The title of the books suggests that we are afraid to recall our painful history, both on a personal level and on a national level. Ellyn is really challenging us not to forget. Not to forget how we treated that fat girl in class, nor how society treats the homeless. Some critics might accuse Ellyn of living in the past (based on the music she listens to Dylan, Phil Ochs, Leonard Cohen, even X is pushing twenty years old) but I think, like historian Howard Zinn, she’s using history to cast a critical eye on the present. I highly recommend this book.