Synopses & Reviews
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
"Endlessly compelling...a book that gives us courage, despite all the despairing records of history." — Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic
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]
Review
"Rebellion, liberation, multitudes." — Ms. Magazine
Review
"Amidst moments of personal trauma...[Elhillo's] poems dig deep into how shame is passed down generations of women....the title of Elhillo's new book sings of the autonomy she imagines for her girls." — NPR
Review
"Fearless...has the makings of a breakthrough." — Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Sudanese by way of D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children and Home Is Not a Country and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, the Arab American Book Award, and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, she is also the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, among others, and has been translated into several languages.