Megan Peak’s debut collection Girldom chronicles coming of age as a woman: the violence of discovery, the evolution of sexuality, and the demanding yet necessary acts of self-preservation and resistance. Amid landscapes of wasps and nettle, cold moons and icy rivers, daughters navigate trauma and desire, sisters bear witness to each other’s trajectories, and girls experience worlds of both rage and tenderness. There is an impounded beauty in Girldom, the beauty of a healing wound. Compressed yet explosive, these poems shake like fists and vibrate with the seeking of voice. “I was a girl before I was anything else,” the poet writes. In the midst of the #MeToo movement, Peak’s book is timely and timeless in its confrontation of the constraints and concerns bound up in being a girl.
One paces the floor, footsteps light as salt.
Another stacks stones, builds a pebbled catacomb.
One of them unstrings a necklace and counts
the pearls. One shines like pomegranate flesh
in a storm. There’s one the shape of a pistol, and one
like a mouth. There’s a girl walking to the window
with a moth in her pocket. You hold one made of copper.
Of sand. Of yellowed cloth. You watch one dive
into a well, her daddy’s belt around her waist.
Already there’s one leaving home and one without a face.
One hides under the snow’s bold dress. Another in a lock
of hair. This girl is a kind of tornado in the spring, gripping
hard the fur of a rabbit’s nape. You call to one
who’s picking foxglove, who’s jumping the fence.
Sometimes you hear one in the attic making spider webs.
Or slipping currants, like dark coins, under her tongue.
There’s one who sits in a field—blue grass rising
around her like fever. But you christen the one who burns
through dirt like a steel hoof. The girl who shears
her long braid to fatten the fire. You don’t call that one luna.
You call her light from a dead, dead place.
Winner of the 2019 Philosophical Society of Texas’s Book Prize in Poetry and the 2018 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters
Finalist for the 2019 daVinci Eye Award and the 2018 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, and poem “What I Don’t Tell My Mother about Ohio” was a finalist for the Nina Riggs Poetry Award from Cave Wall Press