Girlwood
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About this ebook
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.
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