On My Period

Honing in on an artistic experiment, Elena Petrovska wrote every poem in this collection while on her period over the course of about the same time it takes to pop out a baby. With each poem, she swiftly touches on what it means for her to be a woman - especially one on her period. Elena has flipped the switch and allowed herself a pleasurable experience of writing poetry during a stereotypically painful and not-so-pleasurable time-of-the-month. She embraces the roller coaster of emotions and physical sensations. Out of pain, art is born. While receiving confirmation over the course of nine months that she is not pregnant, Elena Petrovska pushes out life and gives birth with her words.

"In a stunning feminist reversal of Dante's famous "words and blood" verses, Elena Petrovska gives voice to women menstruation through her own menstruation, and vice versa, disclosing for us one of the most tabooed of women experiences, one hidden under centuries of ignorance and sealed under the incredibly vague name of "periods": word after word, drop after drop, we enter her world and we do not want to leave it." (Chiara Bottici, The New School, Philosopher and Writer)

"A period is a slice of time and a sentence’s full stop. On My Period balances on both as we must do, dancing in and through our duration, out and through our fleshy confines. Through these poems, Petrovska’s dance is done, as all dances should be done, with the elegance of precarity and the improbability of hope." (Vanessa Place, Criminal Appellate Attorney / Writer)

"The hysteric was historically said to be a woman whose uterus, like an animal, was set loose in her body, driving her mad. It had to be forced back into its rightful place. Elena Petrovska’s poems do precisely the opposite—refusing any proper place, or terms, or traits of femininity, by embodying an intimate everyday language from the place that is a woman, period." (Jamieson Webster, Psychoanalyst / Writer)