Poems to Use When Hiding from the Shadows
Liz DeJesus

By Alyce Wilson

In her poetry collection, Poems to Use When Hiding from the Shadows, Liz DeJesus includes poems written between the ages of 13 to 23. Normally, one waits until establishing oneself as a poet before sharing poems written at a really young age. However, De Jesus is young enough that her earlier poems might not seem like juvenilia to her.

However, the progression over 10 years of writing, starting in her early teens, is not that distinct. There's slightly more sophistication by the end of the collection in terms of grammatical structure, but the common themes of the poems and the way she approaches those topics are similar.

Clearly, there are a couple key issues that concern her as a poet and which form recurring themes. First is the issue of date rape or sexual assault.

Most of her attempts to approach the subject of rape are muted, dancing around the subject with few details or specifics. Unfortunately, a poet must do more than that to draw the reader in. A poet must say that which is hardest to say.

For example, these lines from "Hello" make oblique reference to a personal crisis:

They can't hurt me.
All that is left of me is a ghost.
The ghost of who I used to be.
A black butterfly
brushes past me.
I think it's a sign...
the beginning of the end,
but then I see the white
on the tips of it's (sic) wings.

Just what is it that upsets the speaker of this poem? Why is she a ghost? What brought her to that state?

In another recurring theme, DeJesus writes about emotionally abusive relationships. Time and again, the speaker of the poems describes her beloved as a flawed man, and yet feels she's somehow to blame for those flaws.

DeJesus needs to be fearless about confronting these subjects, to use stark words that get to the heart of how the speaker of these poems is impacted by these experiences. Poetry can be therapeutic, but to do so, it must be evocative. Otherwise, the poem is powerless, as is the speaker in these lines from "Tick Tock":

Always afraid of making the jump,
I am the estranged cat,
that has forgotten the way to her dreams.

PublishAmerica, 2005 (ISBN: 1424102537)