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    Girlwood
    Girlwood
    Girlwood
    Ebook106 pages23 minutes

    Girlwood

    By Jennifer Still

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Shortlisted for the 2012 Aqua Lansdowne Prize for Poetry
    Winner of the 2012 John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer

    A linguistically inventive exaltation, a wild ride down into the privacies, the here-and-goneness of girlhood.

    In Girlwood, Jennifer Still's second collection, her poems come of age: they take the dare; they cross out of sapling and into maturity's thicket. But the poems don’t leave the girl behind, they bring her along: as sylph, as raconteur, as witness, as pure, unstoppable bravado. These songs of liberation and confinement arise from the rich and mysterious connection between mother and daughter. Here, the mother figure is as vulnerable as the daughter, caged by domestic duty, by the fear that snakes through sexuality, the longing and the repulsion that accompany mortal desire. The daughter is at once compassionate and defiant. This is the paradox at the heart of this collection. "Mother, divine me," Jennifer Still writes, and later, "Mother, spare me." Between these two phrases, which are both plea and command, we experience all the tangled pathways between mother and daughter, the cries of devotion and the congested laments.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateOct 15, 2011
    ISBN9781771310093
    Girlwood
    Author

    Jennifer Still

    Jennifer Still's first collection of poems, Saltations (Thistledown Press, 2005) was nominated for three Saskatchewan Book Awards. Poems from Girlwood were finalists in the 2008 CBC Literary Awards. After living her adult years until just recently in Saskatchewan, Jennifer now lives in Winnipeg with her husband and two children.

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      Book preview

      Girlwood - Jennifer Still

      GIRLWOOD

      GIRLWOOD

      JENNIFER STILL

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Still, Jennifer, 1973-

               Girlwood / Jennifer Still.

      Poems.

      ISBN 978-1-926829-66-1

               I. Title.

      PS8637.T54G57 2010         C811’.6         C2010-907672-9

      Copyright © Jennifer Still, 2011

      We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government

      of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts

      Council for their support of our publishing program.

      The cover photograph, 68 Girdwood Crescent, 1975, was taken

      by Jim Still.

      The author photograph was taken by Jennifer Beaudry.

      Brick Books

      Box 20081

      431 Boler Road

      London, Ontario

      N6K 4G6

      Canada

      www.brickbooks.ca

      To the Girdwood girls;

      and for Abby, for Joan.

      And we start, with a new and terrible energy, to write the

      poems of the imagined real place.

                           Robert Kroetsch

      Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes tracks.

                                Lyn Hejinian

      SKIPPING SONG

      you are the other side of the tracks girl

      the step around the crack or you’ll break your mother’s back girl

      the itsy bitsy teeny weeny rack girl

      the last to be picked for the team and the first to get to first base girl

      you’ve got to color within the black lines girl

      you’ve got your pennies lined up on the rail girl

      you’ve got your boxcar vibe and your bangs combed high

      and your hand held tight to the tremor girl—

      TRACKS

      SKIPPING SONG

      TRACK 1

      NEST

      TRACK 2

      SNAKESKIN

      TRACK 3

      THE HUMMINGBIRD

      VIGNETTES

      TRACK 4

      MOTH

      TRACK 5

      LEAF

      NOTES

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      TRACK 1

      you could be      at every turn      the story of the girl you were, there are things you shouldn’t be seeing now from such a comfortable seat, two feet above disaster Nike high-top wedged in the rails, you learn to move swiftly from a stuck position, when the penny trembles and you wear it, your fear of gym

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