Knocking on Windows

In this lucid, accessible verse memoir, Atkins (Green Promises) chronicles her experiences as a college freshman healing from the trauma of sexual violence and finding her voice through poetry. Circa 1972, 18-year-old Atkins returns to her Massachusetts childhood home to process “the word that ends one story and starts another.” When her stoic parents offer little support, she gains fleeting comfort from Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Even as Atkins tries keeping busy with state college, therapy, and a string of jobs, it becomes harder to ignore misogynistic attitudes within her family, her community, and academia that strive to silence her and excuse her rapist’s actions. Atkins’s clarity-seeking letter-poems addressed to Plath, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, and more bristle with honesty. Using symbolic language (“I want to find courage to wrestle out/ what hunkers inside me/ like a wounded bird flapping, ruffling wings”), the author contemplates what it means to be a writer, a woman, and a woman who writes. With empowering eloquence, Atkins reflects on suffering, survival, and sexism as she lived it within the context of the Vietnam War and civil rights legislation. It’s a brave, searing autobiography that recalls the work of Laurie Halse Anderson and Amber Smith. Includes an author’s note and bibliography. Ages 14–up. Agent: Sara Crowe, Sara Crowe Literary. (Aug.)