Though full of lamentation in every sense, the book is surprisingly free of complaint. (Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.) Stay put! cried the guard, and struck me.” In the book’s most famous and inventive passage, her police interrogation is interspersed with lines from The Song of Solomon: “Better not try any funny business, cried the guard, you’re only making things tough for yourself. Reimagining the first throes of what would go on to be an 18-year affair with the English poet George Barker (1913-1991), it details the real story of Smart’s ostracisation by her wealthy Canadian family and arrest under the Mann act, which forbade women from crossing US State lines for “immoral purposes”. This is how By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 prose poem, begins. Before she starts to completely resent her rival, she thinks: “I entirely renounce him for only her peace of mind”. But the person she first notices disembarking is the poet’s wife, for whose travel she has also paid. She has loved him from the moment she read a volume of his early poems. She has never met him, and it has taken a year of ingenuity and planning – posing as a manuscript collector, scraping money together from parents and friends – to bring him from Japan, where he has been teaching. A woman is waiting at a Californian bus station for a man to arrive.
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