Girl with Death Mask (WEB PDF) von Jennifer Givhan

Love, tequila, sex, first periods, late nights, abuse, and heartache. The journey of a Latina girl to womanhood and then motherhood is brimming with transformative magic that heals even as it shatters.

Lifeline

I

The Dying Girl& The Date Palm
The Change
Plan B
Billiards
Quinceañera
Daughter Page Ripped from The Symbol Sourcebook
Miracle of the River Pig
Ignorance
3-Card Spread What Is True What Isn't True Advice
Daughter Lace Your Fingers to the Sky
1.0 out of 5 stars Not For Teennage [sic] Girls*
Hallucination With Danny
What's Been Given Me Secondhand
Faithful Woman
Common Carp

II

Girl with Death Mask
Sin Vergüenza(Como los Pájaros)
Warn the Young Ones
First Response
Sea Level
Avra
Failure The Mother of ______
Pulse
The Rhinoceros Calf
On Contemplating Leaving My Children
Mexican Wedding Cookies
Chassis
The Girl (Whose Mother Filled Her Belly with Meth& Let Terrible People Mutilate Her
Body Before Killing Her) Runs Away

III

La Llorona Comes Over for Dinner

IV

When I Am Not Joan of ArcorYou Bring Me a Bowl of Green& Purple Olives
Refugio State
Candling The Eggs
Bird Bath (Baño de Pájaros)
Ritual
Shame
Furiosa
Three Wolf Spirits
In the Waiting Room of the Child Psychologist
Reabsorption Elegy
Ghost Girl in the Recovery Room
Myth
Retrograde
At the Altar of Staying
This Bridge Called My Back

Love, tequila, sex, first periods, late nights, abuse, and heartache. The journey from girl to womanhood is brimming with transformative magic that heals even as it shatters. These are the memories that haunt the dreams of what was and what could have been inGirl with Death Mask.

In four rich and imaginative movements of poems, Jennifer Givhan profiles the suffering and the love of a Latina girl and then mother coming to terms with sexual trauma. Her daughter is a touchstone of healing as she seeks to unravel her own emotions as well as protect the next generation of budding women with a fierceness she must find within.Givhan exploits changing poetic forms to expose what it means to mature in a female body swirling with tenderness, violence, and potential in an uncertain world.Girl with Death Mask is a cathartic and gripping confession of the trials of adolescence and womanhood.

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of Landscape withHeadless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors' Prize) andProtection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series). Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, and The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications includingPloughshares, POETRY, Boston Review, Blackbird, andThe Kenyon Review. She is Editor-in-Chief atTinderbox Poetry Journal, and she lives with her family in New Mexico.