Morality Play
In Morality Play, Lauren Hilger forges a restless path between the impressionable folly of youth and the boundlessness of individual becoming. A motley buildingsroman of fierce imagination, Morality Play reveals, and revels in, the paradox inherent in its title, angling for a deeper virtue in the sensuousness of words. In poems laced with tenderness for the awkward selves and delusions we shed in our wake, Hilger probes the cultural expectations that shape gender in particular. "I was once an idiot in a denim skirt and cowboy hat, spilling milk in a grocery store. How many songs did I learn to sing I was the fool?" she asks, even as she charts a new self-conception-"raised on a fast pencil, a sound expiring." Like a wild song fluent in, and flung against, constrictive cultural norms-those we inherit, those we reinvent-Morality Play reminds us that "From the world's first cities, it was always a woman / telling the future." Indeed, Hilger's lyrics offer a vision of virtue as expansive as lucid dreaming, where all the "wrong words" become our "mother tongue."