THE FAVORITE

The 64 poems assembled here are grouped in three chronological sections, from childhood to the speaker’s elder years. The speaker and her family exist in a rarefied world (riding lessons, a visit to the White House) that’s strewn with traps. In the opening poem, “Road Trip,” a girl and her five sisters are “all naked in the backseat / of a 1957 Plymouth station wagon,” hot and uncomfortable on the trip to their grandfather’s house. The girls’ starched white dresses crackle in the way back: “Since we’re never / clean enough, we’ll be hauled out at a rest stop / to be straightjacketed into dresses and our mother’s / hope for acceptance.” Meanwhile, the girls’ brother “rides / shotgun and wears what he wants.” Watson’s narrative voice is deceptively simple, its underlying power achieved through such devices as well-calculated line endings that lend emphasis to words like never or that enact the poem’s movement, as when halting at a “rest stop.” The volume’s prose poems, in contrast, overflow their containers, giving a sense of pressured speech. Though many poems express anger or frustration, they also capture a growing appreciation of the speaker’s gifts: “Under the coral sweater / designed by Gianni Versace / sits my elegant heart beating.” Wry humor, too, leavens the collection. In the closing piece, “Adoption,” the speaker considers how well suited she would be to the British royal family: “I know how to dress and have beautiful table manners / and I really feel comfortable with a strict schedule.” The book includes a few photographs that provide a visual commentary, as with “Road Trip” being preceded by the image of a carefully dressed, beribboned girl.

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