Poetry. Winner of the 2022 Washington Prize. In masterfully varied forms, Naomi Mulvihill explores interlocked themes of violence, longing, gender, beauty, despair, and the mysterious fact of our persistence in the face of it all. These poems explore multiplicity-the "throng / we are and are not supposed to be, / the teeming / entirety" of ourselves, and the dire consequences of denying our pluralities. The Knife-Thrower's Girl gives us reality as fluid and full of possibility in a time when we so desperately need it, troubling the gender binary and blurring the artificial boundaries between the human and natural worlds. Language and love, the book's true protagonists, show us the way out of the dangers we have created.
Says poet Cate Marvin, "How to describe the devastating aim of these poems, their achingly certain and emotionally voluptuous address? In her debut collection, The Knife Thrower's Girl, Naomi Mulvihill shows us what it means to embody the poem as action, the poem as belief, the poem that makes sense of it all. While there's a certain luxuriousness to her language that one revels in, it's her exquisite execution of pace that lands the scissors of epiphany in the reader's chest. In short, Mulvihill's marvelous verse is, for the ardent readers of poetry, an absolute must-read."
Editor Andrea Carter Brown adds, "Once in a while, a new poetry collection jumps out, compelling the reader's attention from the first poem. The Knife Thrower's Girl is that book. With lapidary precision, elegance, and beauty, and by focusing her laser-sharp curiosity on the world's complexity, Naomi Mulvihill arrives at a hard-won awareness of what living thoughtfully and fully means. Here are investigations of words, the animate and inanimate world around us, our inmost subconscious assumptions, and the received givens that underpin experience and sometimes determine choice. Follow Mulvihill's always unsentimental explorations: The Knife Thrower's Girl will take you to an astonishing wisdom."
