Description
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2019 East Anglian Book (Poetry) Award. In Girl, Rebecca Goss considers the emotional and physical connections women make to the world around them. The poems interrogate and celebrate female identity and experience, and the dynamics of family and friendship. From a woman struck by lightning to a baby who understands shadows, Goss navigates the real and the imagined with equal flair. At the heart of the collection is a distinctive, sensual series of poems responding to the work of the artist Alison Watt: the result is a fearless exploration of the female body and female desire.
Trade Review`This is a book about human bodies: freckles, fists, itches and that "private reek". Graphic, funny and tender, these poems jostle with bodies that swim, jog, f*ck, medicate, spin on dodgems, grow up and grow ill. Girl is a quivering, kicking reminder of what it is to be alive.' - Clare Pollard; `These are poems of brave surrender to the accident of living, the constant somersault, and regardless of whether the change is huge or tiny - a thunderbolt or an unexpected freckle - it is always fundamental, always shattering, always a thrill.' - Caroline Bird; `Rebecca Goss's voice is quietly passionate. Her forms are exquisitely crafted. Her themes, of human fragility and of our bodies' capacity for pleasure and pain, are universal.' - Vicki Feaver