Thanks to NetGalley and Tin House Press for the ARC!

Brittany Rogers’s Good Dress is a wonderful debut collection, sustained by the feeling of end-of-summer reflection—those final days where one is uncertain whether the sun will sweeten or sour memory.

There’s a lot to admire here, particularly because Rogers covers so much thematic ground without the book ever feeling unfocused. Broadly speaking, each of the themes touch on a coming-of-age experience, but they coalesce because the writing seems so rightfully self-assured. We see nostalgia without cliché, and it’s immensely satisfying to follow a speaker who is in the pocket, simultaneously feeling herself while grieving what it took to get to that point.

Poems often live or die based on their turns, and Rogers maintains such enigmatic precision in how she does so, both stylistically and thematically. She clearly has a well-honed skill and a gift, and it feels almost mysterious to watch her pull so many disparate elements into conversation. She dances between archaic forms and register and hip-hop-tinged looseness, and she pivots effortlessly between sensorial descriptions of food and existential abstractions. These are poems that make you want to eat at a cookout before suddenly satiating that hunger with symbolic meaning.

I suspect different readers will gravitate toward different parts of the book, but I love the poems that wrestle with the distance between a public, documented self and a private self. Through repeated interludes from the Detroit Public Library—like an explanation of debt—or therapy-related documentation like “Intake Form,” the speaker presses against the constraints of “official” language, often allowing readers to see the space between a factual explanation and a truthful explanation. To me, these poems encapsulate the book's core.

Good Dress is so thoughtful about the ways society tries to simplify Black women, and Rogers offer the counterpoint of complexity at every turn.