Girls that Never Die
Feb 2024 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
112
Pages
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About this ebook
'Incredibly moving ... Every single poem is stellar' Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger
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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]
____________________________________________
'Elhillo's is a voice that walks into the future' Ilya Kaminsky
'Brilliant. And fierce' Aracelis Girmay
'An astonishment' Tracy K. Smith
____________________________________________
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]
____________________________________________
'Elhillo's is a voice that walks into the future' Ilya Kaminsky
'Brilliant. And fierce' Aracelis Girmay
'An astonishment' Tracy K. Smith
About the author
Safia Elhillo is an award-winning poet and author. Her debut YA novel-in-verse, Home Is Not a Country, was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor and Arab American Book Award. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and listed in Forbes Africa's 2018 '30 Under 30'. She lives in Los Angeles.
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