In the narrative poems of Memory of a Girl, a young poet journeys to Japan to spend a month caring for her beloved grandmother, who is battling Alzheimer’s disease. There, she struggles to come to terms with a changed grandmother who tells circular, repetitive stories and places the poet into her past. Watching and listening to her grandmother day and night, the poet grapples with the reality and terror of memory loss — the loss of identity, and of history — and fears losing her own precious memories of growing up on her family’s organic vegetable farm. The chapbook mixes joy with sorrow and love as it describes a grandmother slowly becoming once more a girl, and a young woman desperately holding on to childhood bliss as she shifts into adulthood.
