Elizabeth Hodges’s What the River Means, a collection of "story essays," is such a compelling first novel that I didn’t want the book to end. While the intensity of the language is, at times, uneven, the intensity of emotion and memory is not. Told from the perspective of an adult evaluating her childhood and teenage years, What the River Means spans Hodges’ life from her earliest memories, her "way-back memory," through her present life. Currently the associate director of the Composition and Rhetoric Program at Virginia Commonwealth University, Hodges’ narrative-poetry, then, is somewhat of a surprise. Even her earliest memories are enshrined in such lovely detail that the reader feels present at those moments. Honesty is unflinching, such as the recapturing of the birth — and later death — of the author’s younger sister, Kathy. She writes of "jolt of a new sibling"… and the realization of understanding "quite profoundly that there were worlds happening when I was not around … I was aware of this phenomenon of worlds. The more I panicked when I thought of what I was missing and whether I was missed. Yet more and more I withdrew to the shadows at the edges of others’ worlds to observe and take stock, for all practical purposes invisible, perhaps even forgotten." Without self-pity but with the sensitivity of sharply-felt displacement, the writer engages the reader in her childhood.

Each section is prefaced with powerful epigrams, testimony to Hodges’ wide reading pallet. Subjects range from first love, told with incredible poignancy, to experiencing a transfiguring death, holding the fingers of the victim of a car crash until he relinquished her hand. Returning home with boots so deeply-steeped in his blood that they had to be cut from her feet, Hodges evokes immediacy and reflection. Because these accounts are so personal and so unembellished, they are deeply memorable and immediate. Writing as a child who was independent, often dirty, and intractable, Hodges endears the reader as she describes herself in retrospect: "I was round-faced with straight fly away hair, what my cohorts called dirty blond or dishwater blond. I had two cowlicks, one in front and one on top of my head. I had a ski jump nose and round, brown eyes, ever ruddy cheeks in a round face. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I knew for sure that I would look like that all of my life." Regardless of — or perhaps because of — her unprepossessing appearance, Hodges expresses a beautiful soul.

She writes eloquently about childhood lies: "But there is something more to some lying than just telling untruths. Sometimes people lie not because they are wicked but because they want to be wonderful in some way that is denied them by their lives’ circumstances. They lie because they do not like themselves as they are, and they need to revise their histories, perhaps in hopes of revising their futures … to be exotic, special beyond special." Who has not been in this position?

With equal probity, she details comforting another as she watches her mother crying in inexpressible sadness on her 50th birthday: "And silent tears are the most devastating of all. They are not meant to be heard. They are raw anguish, pure grief, the epitome of our internal acid rains. Silent tears are the drowning of sighs of all the sorrow of one who has chosen to keep within one’s self those sighs, released, breathe hot scalding steam into the faces of those who look on." Miraculously, the author and her mother view a herd of deer, that, while ravishing their flower bed, were lovely nevertheless, forming a "peaceful brown blanket, splashed with the white of chests and switching tails, dewy with the many gentle ponds that are the eyes of deer." The poetry of this description is only marginally less beautiful than the story that unfurls. They follow the deer, a good eight miles through the woods, always keeping the animals in sight but not encroaching on their territory. When they return to the celebration of her mother’s birthday, the two women "paused at the edge of the woods to practice our tale … Little could we have explained in words, even to each other, that we had traveled into different lifetimes that day." While fully acknowledging the inadequacy of words, Hodges astonishes with hers. Their accuracy and their captivating candor are, at times, shocking and brilliant.