Marilyn Bushman-Carlton explores how girls her age "learned the lay of the land" and the "dead-end streets" wearing dresses. There was no "scrabbling to the rescue" or "scorching to home base" for girls. Rather, wearing "angel trumpet, fuschia, and inverted tulip" dresses, they played jacks, with "bouquets of skirt bunched in the V of their legs." To long elegant versions, perfumed orchids were "pinned carelessly close to [their] hearts." We Wore Dresses is the metaphorical score behind her subsequent investments in marriage and motherhood, years crescendoing with self-awareness, a resolute love for her husband and children, and a dedicated feminist voice even as grandchildren come along to "climb as high as [they] dare," and whose turn it is to "trip into the summer grass of their enormous lives;" to make the world both "small again...and possible."
**
The poems earlier in the collection show in unsparing terms how girlhood shapes womanly experience; they are indispensable for reading the later poems, more yielding and open. The book is a cabinet of wonders: even the poems that render the most painful moments of the soul's-and body's- progress gleam with magical naming. I am drawn to and enlivened by these generous, musical, sharp poems.
-Lisa Bickmore
Marilyn Bushman-Carlton's fourth poetry collection, We Wore Dresses, is the work of a mature artist completely in command of her craft. These poems explore every stage of the poet's life from girlhood to retirement and every relationship from daughter to wife to mother to grandmother with compassion, elegance, and wit. This work is not to be missed.
-Holly Welker
Marilyn Bushman-Carlton offers these poems like seashells on the palm of a child at the beach for the first time, glimmering in their tender specificity. ... The collection is a mosaic of moments-delightful, rueful, nostalgic, poignant. But the real joy is in how we get to the universal through these specifics-the tutelage of childhood, living in a body, cultural expectations and restrictions. After reading, I feel as if I've had a long sanity walk with a good friend, the kind you can empty yourself to and who helps you pick up each concern and turn it to the light.
-Darlene Young
We Wore Dresses is a rich collection of poems, full of Marilyn Bushman-Carlton's wisdom. The collection demonstrates that she has lived well and loved enormously. ... The poems show continual growth and exploration for Marilyn and her family, and they embody great love and insight. ... This is a collection that is meant for reading and rereading, with new rewards each time it is experienced.
-Susan Elizabeth Howe
