From the Publisher:
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]
My Thoughts:
Safia Elhillo, author of the beautiful YA novel in verse Home is Not a Country, continues to find catharsis amidst personal and generational trauma in her poetry. To be a woman is to be split open and bleeding. To be a Muslim woman is to be split open and bleeding. As women, we are ruptured and broken. But the beauty of these poems is that as women, we are also whole and fierce and powerful beyond measure.
In this year where women are losing power over their own bodies (again) Girls that Never Die by Elhillo is a feminist call to arms as females to see each other and support each other:
& when i live alone
& that man followed me
one night home from the six train
up lexington & into the hallway
tried for hours to break open my front door
you took turns from all your cities & stayed
overnight with me on the phone for three days
snoring & murmuring in your sleep
(excerpt from "Ode to My Homegirls")
Publication Information:
Author: Safia Elhillo
Publisher: One World
Publication date: July 12, 2022
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