This image is the cover for the book Girl with Death Mask, Blue Light Books

Girl with Death Mask, Blue Light Books

The prize-winning poet “crafts a clear-eyed narrative of Latina womanhood in this lovely collection ripe with longing, hope, and broken faith” (Publishers Weekly).

Winner of the Pleiades Editors’ Prize and Miller Williams Poetry Prize, poet Jennifer Givhan now explores the path from girlhood to womanhood through love, tequila, sex, first periods, late nights, abuse, and heartache. She describes a journey brimming with transformative magic that heals even as it shatters.

In four rich movements of poems, Givhan profiles the suffering and the love of a Latina girl who enters motherhood while coming to terms with sexual trauma. Her daughter is a touchstone of healing as she seeks to unravel her own emotions and protect the next generation of women. Givhan uses changing poetic forms to expose what it means to mature in a female body swirling with tenderness, violence, and potential in an uncertain world.

Jennifer Givhan

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize) and Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series). Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, and The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications including Ploughshares, POETRY, Boston Review, Blackbird, and The Kenyon Review. She is Editor-in-Chief at Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and she lives with her family in New Mexico.

Indiana University Press