Publishers Weekly
★ 07/18/2022
In this spellbinding outing, Elhillo (The January Children) examines misogynist attitudes in religion and culture that incite violence against women. “Infibulation Study” addresses female genital mutilation, once a common practice in Sudan, from where the poet’s family emigrated. Conversations with relatives about this practice are relayed with a clinical frankness, “I begin with speculation about our mothers, that each continues to have a clitoris. False,” and with grief, “a body to be sliced like festival lamb.” Elhillo excels at description and resonant, musical imagery (a former love interest had “fingers long as spring onions”). In the prose poem “Memoir,” she narrates a period of her youth spent in New York City with vivid detail: “We slept on each other’s floors & never asked. Dollar/ pizza darkening a paper plate, our bodies crowding the F train,/ crowding the Lower East Side.” Though many poems address the darker aspects of life as a woman, Elhillo also celebrates the powerful bonds among women who support one another, as in “Ode to My Homegirls,” in which she exalts the joys of female friendship. This is an astonishing paean to the women who endure and triumph together. (July)
From the Publisher
Fearless . . . has the makings of a breakthrough.”—Los Angeles Times
“Amidst moments of personal trauma . . . [Elhillo’s] poems dig deep into how shame is passed down generations of women. . . . With these conversations comes power. And the title of Elhillo’s new book sings of the autonomy she imagines for her girls.”—NPR
“Rebellion, liberation, multitudes.”—Ms. Magazine
“Girls That Never Die is an incredibly moving, and well-structured collection of poetry about being a Muslim girl, about shame, about the silent hurts women carry, about the pressures of cultural expectations, about dangerous silences. The writing here is incisive and intimate and eloquent. Truly, a stunning collection of poems. I particularly appreciated the range of forms across the poems and the structure of the book as a whole. Many of the poems end in ways that will leave you gasping. Loved this book. Some standout poems: Ode to My Homegirls, Zamalek, and Orpheus but really every single poem is stellar, no skips as the kids say. Also, A+ cover.”—Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger
“When I open a new book by Safia Elhillo, I know there will be fearlessness and beauty. There will be a voice that contains multitudes and yet is original and memorable in its daring. There is always lyricism and nuance, and memorable speech that knows how poetry opposes history. Indeed, Girls That Never Die is a book that gives us courage, despite all the despairing records of history. How does Elhillo do this? Perhaps by letting these pages be the space where witness and a new kind of mythology meet. And this meeting gives us strength. Why? Because there is in these poems an endlessly compelling voice that is unafraid to be vulnerable in order to tell the truth, a voice that walks against the current, walks between cultures, between languages, bridging them with honesty. Elhillo’s is a voice that walks into the future.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic
“Safia Elhillo traces the ongoing devastations of patriarchy while simultaneously making a refuge out of language, kinship, and sound. Electric, violet, plural with girls, this work pulses with memory and refusal, awakening language with its lucid imagination. Girls That Never Die is a book of resuscitations. Brilliant. And fierce.”—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
“I am rapt, finding here the hurt and the heft of girlhood. All the old silences, all the unuttered shames are ruptured, tended to, and—finally—named. Elhillo is a poet of wisdom, rigor, and vindicating care. Girls That Never Die is an astonishment.”—Tracy K. Smith, author of Ordinary Light and Wade in the Water
