Girl Work
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“Girl Work” from GIRL WORK: by Zefyr Lisowski.
Published by Noemi Press March 15, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Zefyr Lisowski.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Zefyr Lisowski is the author of the essay collection Uncanny Valley Girls (Harper Perennial 2025). A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Nonfiction and 2023 Queer|Art Fellow, she’s also the author of two poetry collections, Girl Work (Noemi Press 2024), winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry, and Blood Box (Black Lawrence 2019). She lives in Brooklyn and at zefyrlisowski.com.
WINNER OF THE 2022 NOEMI PRESS BOOK AWARD IN POETRY
GIRL WORK, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, GIRL WORK challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout GIRL WORK, a self is restored from the detritus of memory—flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.
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