THE LONELIEST GIRL
Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series
University of New Mexico Press, 2022
Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series
University of New Mexico Press, 2022
Who was more alone than Medusa? Raped in Athena's temple, transformed into a monster, and banished into a cave, Medusa may be the ultimate example of victim blaming. In The Loneliest Girl, Kate Gale creates a powerful alternative narrative for Medusa and for all women who have carried guilt and shame--for being a woman, for not being enough, for being a victim. She offers a narrative in which women are the makers of the world--in which women find their way out from the cave of the Cisthene and into a world where they determine their own destiny.
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Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Bookshop • University of New Mexico Press
"The Loneliest Girl is a testament to resilience, including its limits, a testament to the will to rise above a childhood where a girl has to sit on a seat of shame, and made to believe it is her own creation. This is the deft hand of the poet carving stone, not for the caress of water, but of the fiery blood that engraves stone. In lines with the radiance of silk on fire, Gale reveals an inner theater of transparency. These are poems that sing the world of song inside pain in a call for gentleness, for a meditative empathy toward the lonely girls in the world whose strength should inspire the searching of our own souls for what hurts us, as we see, in these poems, the courage a lonely girl must have to build the will to live."
—Afaa M. Weaver, author of Spirit Boxing