Girldom by Megan Peak

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.

Daughters

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.

In her bold debut collection, Megan Peak writes, ‘I was a girl before I was anything else.’ The girls in Girldom—the one ‘who burns/through dirt like a steel hoof,’ the one ‘who shears/her long braid to fatten the fire’—hack their way through the nettles and thorns of sexual awakening and sexual trauma. Claiming one’s body—one’s self—is vulnerable, brave, and important. So are these poems.

—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

If there are so many ways of being emptied, are there equally as many ways of being filled up again? Each person gets to decide how to regain fullness. Poems, like photographs, with their edges as boundaries, are great at showing just enough information to make meaning possible. And that’s precisely what Peak gives us in Girldom—just enough to make meaning possible.

—Katy Dycus, The Wild Detectives Bookstore

Poetry… doesn’t [always] whisper, we’re in this together. But Peak’s work did, to me. And I’m writing this, more or less, as a thank you to Peak and Perugia Press. Every time I open Girldom, I feel as if I’m pulled into a world of ice, tenderness, thorns, honey, and all of the messy work that healing is. All of the messy work that being a girl is.

—Bina Ruchi Perino