Girl with Death Mask
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- €7.99
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- €7.99
Publisher Description
The prize-winning poet “crafts a clear-eyed narrative of Latina womanhood in this lovely collection ripe with longing, hope, and broken faith” (Publishers Weekly).
Winner of the Pleiades Editors’ Prize and Miller Williams Poetry Prize, poet Jennifer Givhan now explores the path from girlhood to womanhood through love, tequila, sex, first periods, late nights, abuse, and heartache. She describes a journey brimming with transformative magic that heals even as it shatters.
In four rich movements of poems, Givhan profiles the suffering and the love of a Latina girl who enters motherhood while coming to terms with sexual trauma. Her daughter is a touchstone of healing as she seeks to unravel her own emotions and protect the next generation of women. Givhan uses changing poetic forms to expose what it means to mature in a female body swirling with tenderness, violence, and potential in an uncertain world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Givhan (Protection Spell) crafts a clear-eyed narrative of Latina womanhood in this lovely collection ripe with longing, hope, and broken faith. Trauma operates like an inheritance; it's expected for Givhan's speaker as she matures out of girlhood. The opening poem, "Lifeline," sets the tone, foreshadowing the running theme of painful sacrifice in the name of love: "For my slit skin you pricked/ your own called us blood buddies." Givhan refuses to sugarcoat the horrors, tragedies, and pain such sacrifice entails. Givhan's protagonist is a survivor of constant physical and emotional dangers; in "Billiards," the speaker laments the realities of her environment: "I'm trying to remember// it's not her fault or his We're all/ pawns in this game of bullshit// Is this how it is where you live." Though her path to womanhood is littered with loss, she endures. In the title poem, for example, artist Frida Kahlo symbolizes the challenges of girlhood when the speaker confesses, "when I was a girl & never imagined/ the funerals I'd/ become." Love is never easy here, and Givhan's speaker expresses this sentiment in relation to motherhood: "My daughter looks/ away uneasy// as if she understands/ how long// I've longed/ for redemption." Givhan explores the dark sides of adolescence and womanhood with searing imagery and a healthy dose of empathy.
