Perhaps the girl could be saved in Sex Ed class, as in “[A few thing I learned about sex],” or by attitudes toward her first menses in “Thirteen,” or even in the way she is dressed by her mother. Or perhaps nothing would save her, but there are clues that help the speaker of several poems (clearly a crime scene investigator by “[Methods. Listen]” on page 20) find a story in what remains:

The poems in this collection move toward intimate depictions of landscape and the natural world through scenarios least likely to be lovely. But because, it seems, bodies of lost girls are always discovered in remote and peaceful places or places of wild wasteland near to hand, but un-noticed, because all we have to imagine over the horror of abduction and abandonment is the loveliness of the natural world, Darst describes it as such. In “[Beautyberry],” her imagery grows lush, fertilized by decay, no doubt, but blooming for girls who never will:

Darst’s specificity in terms of flora works nicely with the specific language of scientific examination of bodies and gives us some relief from the horror of her subject. It is in her sensual language that these poems gain our hard-won interest. They do not fear the human body and its ultimate relation to earth through death. They do not fear rot or ruin. They make clear this story we’ve been told so long — girl is in danger, girl must be wise — means nothing against nature in its redness, in its drama of predator and prey. We can keep telling the story of Snow White, but until the girl winds up dismembered by seven small sexual predators, the story itself lies. We cannot lie, Darst says with these poems, we cannot lie and still find the girl in time.