Review: Highly Sensitive Femme by Alessandra Naccarato // Margaryta Golovchenko

What are the characteristics of the “highly sensitive femme”? What does she look like and where can she be found? These are some of the questions raised in the sequence “Characteristics of a Highly Sensitive Femme” to which there is no formal answer, giving the reader a yes/no option response without providing them with a definitive answer key at the end of the collection. Naccarato’s Highly Sensitive Femme can be categorized as a collection about observing. It explores not only what it means to see and hear but also tries to show the reader a glimpse beyond the comforting veil of the familiar and the expected, encouraging us to pick up on things that have been previously overlooked. Opening in the present and familiar reality with “There Is So Much I Want To Tell You” and “In his defense,” Naccarato places the fantastical world of Greek mythology and fairy tales next to poetic accounts of the everyday struggles women face on a social and cultural level. The culmination of these mistreatments lay in “In your defense,” in the pleading voice of a speaker who addresses a “you” that is both contained in the poem and extends beyond it to the reader: "This is the only body I have. I tried to tell you on the way back, / when your hands wouldn’t leave my skirt and the driver kept asking / if he should pull over. No was the only word I said."In “The Strip of the Nereid” and “Diana Leaves the Forest,” the reader is confronted with how the imagination and the fantastical serve as a cover-up, a sugary guise for the alarmingly real abuse and mistreatment women face, whether it is the nereids who are "paying rent to father even now: / a sailor, a sea star, a kiss" or the familiar trope of woman as an object for adoration that is waiting to be claimed by man, spending "One month mute as he offered names, tried to give / me one he owned."Although it might seem as if nowhere is safe from the misdoings of contemporary society, not even the world of the imaginary, “Baba Yaga As Hard Femme” was the most uplifting and empowering poem in Highly Sensitive Femme. It’s Naccarato’s nudge and whisper to the reader that this is what femme might look like. Naccarato reminds us that the femme does not always look how we might expect it to, nor does it always conform to our ideas of gender, motherhood, or beauty.The function, then, of the “Characteristics of a Highly Sensitive Femme” sequence is twofold: to unify the collection as well as to make the reader think beyond the idea that all questions lead to a set and logical conclusion. The poems in Highly Sensitive Femme encourage dialogue by beginning it, presenting femme not just as the female body but also as a shared fight against both mistreatment and easy classification.