Review: What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack by Paola Ferrante // Margaryta Golovchenko

Few things excite me more than the influx of poetry collections by female poets that focus on reclaiming one’s identity from the current patriarchal system, fighting for the right to have a say in crafting the definition of what it means to be a woman. Paola Ferrante’s What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack joins the ranks of recent behemoths like Sit How You Want by Robin Richardson and Brute by Emily Skaja in this genre, yet there is one noticeable difference between Ferrante’s offering and those of her contemporaries. There is a reassuring side to Ferrante’s collection, as if a soothing gel is instantly applied after every single piercing blow, be it an accusation or a devastating confession. Without sacrificing the critical voice that characterizes her poems, Ferrante creates moments of meditative contemplation that act as pockets of relief in the tense and overwhelming environment of the present. Ferrante asks the reader to consider the boundaries between personal growth that one undergoes willingly versus the enforced, often negative, changes that society pressures women into. Taking on a variety of familiar subjects, such as love and abuse and the implicit and explicit forms of motherhood, Ferrante weaves in and out of the present and the historical, the personal, and the literary, as one finds the Amazons, Bluebeard, and Buffalo Bill contained within one volume (although the avid reader and academic in me really wished there was a “Notes” section at the end that traced these references). Yet regardless of whether they are written in first or second person or who the speaker is in each of these poems, Ferrante maintains the sense that it is always one individual sifting through the collection to try on an array of roles as they would trying on masks. In doing so, she draws attention to a core problem that is not confined to a specific place or time, one that we still have not adequately addressed in either fiction or real life.More important for me is seeing Ferrante consider a variety of definitions and strategies of survival, as in the poem “The Mere Exposure Effect, or How to Make Men Like You,” where the speaker informs the reader:

It’s well known lion fish pursue without warnings; it’s well known you will be well-liked if you as an octopus are more like the one who is doing the liking.Mimicry is defence.

By revisiting the idea that there is bravery in deciding not to fight back and instead to focus on one’s health and well-being, Ferrante reminds us not to underestimate the importance of self-care and admitting that there are times when it is difficult to constantly fight back. Rather than justifying violent responses in oppressive situations, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack adds a sense of inevitability to the circumstances, stating simply, in “Beauty and the Beast”: “a bear bites / only to show / you are too close.”The gems of What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack are Ferrante’s prose poems, which read like a hypnotic stream of consciousness, full of observations that mesmerize with their flow, as they slowly unravel to reveal terrifying truths. It is those moment of realization that I enjoy most, the most striking of which occurred in “Things She Wants,” the opening poem of the collection: “A jockey / cannot hit a horse, a female horse, anywhere except on the rump or the / flank with a riding crop but when it comes to the woman, the human / woman, he breaks the rules and no one will believe her.”It would also be wrong not to give special attention to the titular poem “Impossible Split, or What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack,” which is a tour de force in its own right. A culmination of all the directions, thoughts, and voices that Ferrante explores in the rest of the collection around it, the poem reads like her personal contribution to the genre of fairy tales, an offering that feels more real than imaginary to the point where it makes the reader focus on the terrifying reality and legacy of silence and abuse. It is inarguably my favourite piece in the collection, one that cannot be quoted lest its integrity as a wholly moving piece is disturbed, which is why I urge any curious reader to skip to page 33 and begin their reading of What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack with this very poem, to experience its mastery first-hand.Not all the poems in Ferrante’s debut collection have a flowing-verging-on-logical narrative cohesiveness to them; some instead opt for a more condensed and focused approach, reading like a round of bullets that have been shot out in a rapid sequence. Others, like the moving “Even This Poem Is Blue,” are quite the opposite, in this case creating a narrative progression that mimics the accumulation of literal and emotional baggage in way that is characteristic of the collection as a whole. Regardless of which approach is more to your taste, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack has something for everyone in a stylistic sense. At the same time, it provides multiple avenues for discussion on why we continually fail to protect women and eradicate misogyny, asking readers to believe in her writing as they should in stories of survivors. 

Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history at York University and can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.