Description

One World, paperback

Publication Date: July 12, 2022

Publisher Marketing:Intimate poems that explore feminine shameand violence and imagine what liberation from these threats might look like, from the award-winning author ofThe January Children

InGirls 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 womens 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 Dieis 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]