This award-winning debut collection chronicles coming of age as a woman: the violence of discovery, the evolution of sexuality, and the demanding yet necessary acts of self-preservation and resistance.
Megan Peak's debut collection GIRLDOM chronicles coming of age as a woman: the violence of discovery, the evolution of sexuality, and the demanding yet necessary acts of self-preservation and resistance. Amid landscapes of wasps and nettle, cold moons and icy rivers, daughters navigate trauma and desire, sisters bear witness to each other's trajectories, and girls experience worlds of both rage and tenderness. There is an impounded beauty in GIRLDOM, the beauty of a healing wound. Compressed yet explosive, these poems shake like fists and vibrate with the seeking of voice. "I was a girl before I was anything else," the poet writes. In the midst of the #MeToo movement, Peak's book is timely and timeless in its confrontation of the constraints and concerns bound up in being a girl.
"In her bold debut collection, Megan Peak writes, 'I was a girl before I was anything else.' The girls in GIRLDOM--the one 'who burns / through dirt like a steel hoof, ' the one 'who shears / her long braid to fatten the fire'--hack their way through the nettles and thorns of sexual awakening and sexual trauma. Claiming one's body--one's self--is vulnerable, brave, and important. So are these poems." --Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
"Megan Peak's GIRLDOM is a breathtaking and necessary book that confronts childhood mythology, sexual consciousness and violence, and the nature of love. In one poem, Peak writes, 'your mouth was full of fields/ with horses, all unbound--all crying / their long red sounds, ' and in another, '. . .but the light bulb, / which is my tongue, glows--.' How perfectly these lines capture the experience of reading Peak's extraordinary poems. GIRLDOM is a powerful debut by a poet who has the sensual, grieving world in her mouth." - Allison Benis White, author of Please Bury Me in This
"In GIRLDOM, Megan Peak writes, 'For each girl / I've ever been, I call a detective.' And what can the investigations yield but her body, her sister, her sexuality? What is a girl but a foal who can't live, the dull utility of boxes, the sting of wasp and nettle, a tender bleeding in the snow? Peak's love of language and of women, her indictment of male violence and self-blame, her brave and artful exploration of trauma and its aftermath are but a few of the reasons to cherish this debut. Peak's growth narrative is a complex emotional experience rather than a linear one, her material investigated through the lens of a queer survivor of sexual violence in poems alternately angry, luscious, chilling, and rhapsodic: evidence ample and accessible enough to challenge, affect, and--I daresay--change a reader."--Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore
Poetry. Family & Relationships. LGBTQ+ Studies. Women's Studies.
