Review: "The Number 12 Looks Just Like You" by Emily Perkovich

The Number 12 Looks Just Like You by Emily Perkovich
Published October 2023 via Finishing Line Press
★★★

I am the space that I fill, and it has always been too much, though I am still somehow never quite enough. ("Whelm", loc. 140)

Perkovich's poetry chapbook explores themes of body image and eating disorders, starving and purging and shame. Some poems are more concrete than others and some more experimental, and this is very much a collection for readers who want to work for their bread poems. For once my favorite piece is the shortest, "How to Become a Micro Poem"—it's one of the most straightforward but even so the title alone could be enough fodder for an essay. See also: the title, and the tattooed Barbie on the cover; take a picture-perfect, coiffed Barbie, perhaps, and then peel off her dress and her armor and see what is hidden underneath.

Chapbooks are by definition short—The Number 12 Looks Just Like You clocks in at fifteen poems, most of which are about a page long. I admit to struggling somewhat with chapbooks (a personal problem, and one not specific to this particular book) because of their length; it's harder to build up a narrative arc when your total word count is measured in the hundreds rather than the thousands or the tens of thousands. I'd be curious to see where this would go if expanded to a point when the body is a riot, when it's past the cycles of emptiness and haunting, when the vacant map begins to be filled in.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.