Description
Book SynopsisPoems that address cultural pressures placed on women and girls. This is a book for those who were raised to be girls and expected to become women, for those who were told they were too girly and not girly enough, and for those who were ogled, talked over, touched, fed, imagined, and indoctrinated in ways they didn’t want. Angela Hume writes directly about the experience of womanhood, addressing the boundaries and pressures imposed from childhood on. She considers the persistent instructions to smile, be quiet, and act happy, all administered with the promise that this forced behavior would make everything better. The poems address rigid social norms and, ultimately, walk through the uncomfortable realizations about the bigger systems at play and call on us to examine our own complicity in them.
Trade Review“Hume’s profoundly intimate collection imagines how the porous interiors of women’s bodies are harmed and sickened by sexual violence, the industrial food system, racist fascism, climate change, and environmental contamination. In the middle of everything, Hume rehearses acts of tenderness, empathy, courage, and desire in order to protect and ‘love the body in its / one life its singular intensity after all.’” -- Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold
