Girl
by Veronica Golos
89 pages, 29 poems
Price: $25.00
ISBN-10: 0999484842
ISBN-13: 978-0999484845
Publisher: 3: A Taos Press
To Order: www.3taospress.com


ABOUT THE BOOK:


Veronica Golos' fourth poetry book, Girl, deepens her impressive command of
utterance and dialectic. Lifting off the page, the poems execute with precision
the internal, deep prayered world of Girl and the outer, harsh unprayered world.
The poems articulate both the inability to express oneself and the refusal to do
so as an act of self-hood and rebellion. Alternating voices rub against the
sensual life: the splendid mane of horses, leaving the body for a night sky, the
dive into green waters. Golos' use of poetic and visual form, prophesy, fairy
tale, and myth captures a delicate vulnerability in a threatening world. Her
poems invoke a frisson of daughtermotherhood—an arc of loss and reunion. Girl
reminds us of the intelligence of childhood: perceptive, gifted, imaginative—a
communion between hope and ache.


ADVANCE PRAISE:


Veronica Golos is an inimitable poet: In this book, the urgency of lyric impulse
and the urgent beat of her musical lines give us the spell of a story. Cinemati,
symphonic, endlessly inventive, this collection of poems…is an orchestra, it is
a deeply moving myth.
—Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic


Girl is inscribed by a poet gifting us with a work of fine art, combining
nostalgia, pathos, symbolism, beautiful language, experimentation, and internal
rhythm and music. These are poems in multiple, exhilarating narratives: a girl
who does not "quite fit into the world", who talks to the gods and receives
gifts from them; leaves her body and wanders around the night; knows the
language of young horses' ears, hoofs, eyelashes. Girl is a thrilling book.
—Nizar Sartawi, My Shadow, Amman, Jordan


With a sure touch and fierce clairvoyance, Veronica Golos guides her reader to
the uncanny crossroads of memory, prophecy, fairy tale, and myth. "What I know
is more than thorn/and thistle," the poet assures us in a voice "burning with
Yes,/damage, coil, but also/conduit." These deft poems read like the love
children of Angela Carter and Sappho, bred in a decidedly American landscape: a
fish market in Chinatown, the Thalia Theatre on the Upper West Side, aspen
groves, ponderosa, lakes that have "the hush/of depth." In this hush, magic
happens: "Then the Wolf/Will raise one word,/And that word shall be Girl/And we
shall be/Inside Him, again,/Whole." Golos has gifted her reader with a book of
poems for grown-ups to grow up on.
—Cassandra Cleghorn, Four Weathercocks


In Girl, a complex symphony of voices, part memoir, part allegory, exposes
truths of growing up in cultures where young girls and young women often fall
prey to societal expectations and harm…Bittersweet and sensuous, through poems
like "Daughterspeak" that calls to mind the natural world and earth as mother,
Girl is a fairy tale for a modern world, vulnerable and ferocious.
—CMarie Fuhrman, co-editor, Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Veronica Golos is founding co-editor of the Taos Journal of
International Poetry & Art, former Poetry Editor for the Journal
of Feminist Studies in Religion, and core faculty at Tupelo
Press's Writers Conferences. Golos is the author of four poetry
books, GIRL (3: A Taos Press) awarded the Naji Naaman
Honor Prize for Poetry, 2019 (Beirut, Lebanon); Rootwork (3:
A Taos Press. 2015); Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press,
2011), winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award, translated
into Arabic by poet Nizar Sartawi; and A Bell Buried Deep (Storyline
Press, 2004), co-winner of the 16th Annual Nicholas Roerich
Poetry Prize, adapted for stage and performed at Claremont School
of Theology, Claremont, CA. Golos has lectured at Columbia
University’s Teacher’s College, Hunter College, Julliard School
of Music, Regis University, University of New Mexico, Dine
(Navajo) Technical College, Kansas State University, Transylvania
University, and Colorado State University, among others; She
lives in Taos, New Mexico. U.S.A., with her husband, David Pérez.

Veronica's Book launch and reading will be at OPCIT in Santa Fe, Feb 16, 2020 at 2pm


FROM THE BOOK:


I imagine the gods saying, We will make it up to you.  We will give you three wishes, they say.
         —Jack Gilbert, Imagine the Gods.

They are nowhere to be seen or heard. I know. I've walked
dune-like hills, trespassed the Morada, crossed the arid
arroyo deep and bitter with dust. I've searched and

they are gone, they no longer whisper in my throat
as they used to, when I was the girl. "Girl," they'd say,
"turn this corner, now, and be safe." Most

times I did what they prompted, made my way though
the warren of my mother's madness, tangled my long braids
with ribbons in talisman colors of ruby and white.

The gods would nudge me in sleep, singing their songs,
urging rest between battle. They'd give me a new name,
recount the days I'd lived, slip me the heart of someone's
daughter. "Eat," they'd say, "be strong."

II.

When I was the girl
The gods also gave gifts. I could fly.
My girl body, in my yellow duck
pajamas stayed sleeping on the bed, of course, in case
I was looked for; but the I
of me, the one the gods whispered

warnings to, rose out of my girl
body, and through the window
floated along the rooftops.
It was a little joy I was allowed, and I told

no one. I'd hum as I drifted through the night air, sing
a song meant to be heard
only by me. I'd glide above the streets, the streetlamps
little stars, a slight rain
softening the city into another somewhere.

Then, I'd have to go back. And
the body would welcome me, yes,
but this me would be a bit sad,
to be inside flesh again,
and know what I knew.


Poem from GIRL, Veronica Golos  

Return to: