Girls That Never Die
Poems
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Intimate poems that explore feminine shame and violence and imagine what liberation from these threats might look like, from the award-winning author of The January Children
“Incredibly moving . . . Every single poem is stellar.”—Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger
In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power.
Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning:
[what if i will not die]
[what will govern me then]
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this spellbinding outing, Elhillo (The January Children) examines misogynist attitudes in religion and culture that incite violence against women. "Infibulation Study" addresses female genital mutilation, once a common practice in Sudan, from where the poet's family emigrated. Conversations with relatives about this practice are relayed with a clinical frankness, "I begin with speculation about our mothers, that each continues to have a clitoris. False," and with grief, "a body to be sliced like festival lamb." Elhillo excels at description and resonant, musical imagery (a former love interest had "fingers long as spring onions"). In the prose poem "Memoir," she narrates a period of her youth spent in New York City with vivid detail: "We slept on each other's floors & never asked. Dollar/ pizza darkening a paper plate, our bodies crowding the F train,/ crowding the Lower East Side." Though many poems address the darker aspects of life as a woman, Elhillo also celebrates the powerful bonds among women who support one another, as in "Ode to My Homegirls," in which she exalts the joys of female friendship. This is an astonishing paean to the women who endure and triumph together.
