Like its cheeky, irreverent back cover, where the hair comes down, the dead skins are removed, and the hidden arts of the flesh are bared, this collection of Secrets is a glowing unsilencing. "Explore how a culture sublimates the things that seem to threaten the established order, creating secrets kept by individuals as well as institutions," the editors at Blue Heron invite. And they prod, "How does a society cleanse itself of secrets and become more open?"

In this collection, the national secret of child abuse is delicately uncovered in the stroking of piano keys (Hollis Giamatteo's "The Confusion of Learning"); a gentle coming out poem by Beth Bailey ("Everyone Is...") begins with an epigraph from haut drag queen Ru Paul: "Everyone is born naked/and after that, everything is a drag"; Dorothy Allison brings her customary caustic and complicit eye to her "A Question of Class"; Matt Yuranda crafts a stunning homoerotic poem around the customs of bee-keeping; voyeur and sequestered exhibitionist meet against metal and concrete in Tamar Perla's short fiction, "Freeway"; Lidia Yuknavitch offers "Four Secrets I Kept from Wife Life" through a thoughtful blend of shifting narrative points of view; there are cautionary, instructional, didactic, and fervent explorations of the occluded, both in the interview with New Zealand author Keri Hulme (The Bone People) and throughout the entirety of this forward-thinking anthology on disclosures.

Better still, the design of the book is a study of sublimated codes, in itself. Working with a collection of graphics they call "Code of the Road," the editors (headed once more by the very able Linny Stovall) implement a string of signs carved or written by street peoples for many years: "afraid," "dishonest," "tell pitiful story" and "don't give up" are a few of the many signs littered throughout the pages of this collection. An illustrated index in the back provides the reader with unique ways of interpreting the design of each page read. Blue Heron's commitment to honoring subterfuge brings a fresh brand of nobility to the undercurrents of our many U.S. cultures.

In Secrets, even the effervescent Barbie doll is given her own voice and standing, in the complexities of our shared histories. Commenting on the oddities of personal/political development, poet Lucia Maria Perillo gives us the sardonic "confessional" "Barbie Tells Her Biography," which begins:

 

The day JFK was shot you laid me in the mud
and ground the boy-doll into me.
But even Ken could not commit the sin
of trespass, his organs palsied in a lump.
Child: you were breeding new America
from my petrochemical body, my breasts
two warheads aimed at Cuba, right buttock
bearing the mark of the toy empire.

You found my seams all shut: price
paid for the deathless crotch, for afternoons
spent wheeling round the yard in the Dreamobile.
The Johnson years, you left me
locked for days in a vinyl coffin full of gowns.
My feet were arched in ready spasm
for those tiny spiked heels
you'd have me grind into a rival commie's eye.

The searing acuity of this poem is softened, in its final stanzas, by the groping nostalgia of "First Ladies": iconographic women of state, of home, of childhood meridians. This is poetry worth remembering, teaching, admiring.

The truth-telling in this volume, so engaging for us at STANDARDS, is further represented by the selection we are reprinting for our readers here. Enjoy the loosening of tongues, and the rending, joyous waggling of tales untold...