Poetry Review: 'There Are Girls Like Lions: Poems About Being a Woman', ed. by Cole Swense, illustr. by Karolin Schnoor
Pub. Date: 3/5/2019
Publisher: Chronicle Books
An anthology of poems about the experience of being a woman
With 30 rousing and empowering poems: For mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, partners, and friends, There Are Girls Like Lions is a celebration of womanhood in all its dimensions, including love, beauty, friendship, motherhood, work, aging, and much more. This powerful collection of poems will resonate with any modern woman.
• Foreword by award-winning American poet Cole Swensen who has authored more than ten books of poetry
• Striking illustrations in metallic ink throughout
• With poems from a variety of women poets including Margaret Atwood, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Kimiko Hahn, Elisabeth Hewer, Rachel Zucker, Emily Dickinson, Naomi Shihab Nye, and more
Fans of the novel An American Marriage, The Future is Feminist, and Women of Resistance will be inspired and empowered by There are Girls Like Lions.
Discover 30 poems that honor and celebrate the experience of being a woman.
Being a woman, living as a woman, being perceived as a woman, it comes with countless different experiences. This can only get personal, so stay with me. I was born as a woman and identify with a woman. I have felt incredibly happy to be a woman and I have also cursed my fate. As a woman I have felt cherished and wanted, and I have also felt hunted and despised. My body has made me feel powerful and capable of creation, and it has also felt like a limiting cage. Moving back and forth between traditional ideas of womanhood and the freedom feminism and suffrage have given us is a difficult thing. And that is only my experience, and on top of that also a white woman's experience. In There Are Girls Like Lions, Swensen brings together poems from different centuries and eras as well as from different countries and backgrounds. While some of these poems are joyful songs of power, others are shouts of anger. Some are wistful and sad, others are quietly inspirational. While no single collection can capture all of the female experience, this collection gives it a good go.
Some of my favourite poems were 'Here Are Girls Like Lions' by Elisabeth Hewer, which is like a battle cry or a war song. Specifically I loved the lines 'Here are girls who carry kindness / And katanas in their rucksacks / because they never know which they'll need.' Another one I enjoyed was 'Siren Song' by Margaret Atwood because I loved how twisty this poem is, how the siren's most powerful lure is the desire to be rescued by you, yes you, you can be the man of my dreams. As the poem says 'It is a boring song / but it works every time.' The poem that probably got to me the most was 'Demeter's Cutting' by Kimiko Hahn. As the title probably suggests, this is a poem about mothers and daughters. For me this poem felt like it showed that right rope between a mother and daughter made up of their shared experience of womanhood, the way the daughter never wants to be her mother, while the mother sees her daughter have all the same fantasies and make all the same choices. 'Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting...' by Naomi Shihab Nye spoke to me because me and my (all female) housemates have become a coven of knitters and crochet-ers. This one line from Nye's poem really spoke to why I wanted to learn these crafts, 'She looks young to crochet. / I'm glad history isn't totally lost.' My grandmother had these skills, and my mother also has them. Now I know them and it makes me happy to continue that skill and tradition. It may feel "traditional" but it's also culture and legacy which shouldn't be ignored or forgotten.
Most joyful for me was 'Loose Woman' by Sandra Cisneros which is just a riot of self confirmation. It's about taking all the negative things people will say to you and turn them into badges of honour. It's about laughing in the face of those who want to hurt you or diminish you. Break something, if you have to. Let it all out! 'A Plaint of Complexity' by Eunice Tietjens was the poem that felt like it could have been, must have been written for me, or about me. Tietjens writes about the many selves of being a woman, being torn between different versions of yourself which play up to different stereotypes but also to different needs. I find it impossible to really identify my core self, for the exact reasons this poem lays out. For an overview of all the poems, please scroll down.
My only "critique" for this collection is that while its focus is technically clear, it is also a tad vague. The poems aren't categorized into different themes, for example, so while the poems kind of interact with each other, like when Mary Oliver's 'The Son' is followed by Gertrude Stein's 'Daughter', they don't fully link. Sexuality is a topic but not fully or actively explored. Violence against women is mentioned, but is not spotlighted. I guess in the end There Are Girls Like Lions is a collection that sets no restrictions on what being a woman is, but thereby it also pushes no boundaries and does not expand the concept. For me that slightly lessened the pull of the collection, but I nonetheless am happy to have had a chance to read these poems. Karolin Schnoor's illustrations are beautiful and solid, strong in their clear lines. Made up of of four colours, red, gold, black, and white, her illustrations are a great addition to the poems and frequently bring out new aspects or key lines from the poems themselves. For the artwork alone I'd consider buying this book!
I give this collection...
4 Universes!
The collection itself would have been 3 but the illustrations pushed it up for me, since they really elevate this collection into something beautiful and a piece of art.
All poems:
Here Are Girls Like Lions' -Elisabeth Hewer; 'Deathless Aphordite of the Spangled Mind' - Sappho, trans. Anne Carson; 'Atalanta in Arcadia' - Barbara Guest; 'Siren Song' - Margaret Atwood'; I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed' - Edna St. Vincent Millay*; 'The Annunciation' - Cole Swensen'; Demeter's Cutting' - Kimiko Hahn*; 'Appetite' - Tracy K. Smith; 'The Son' - Mary Oliver; 'Daughter' - Gertrude Stein; 'Obedience, or The Lying Tale' - Jennifer Chang; 'Questions for Miriam' - Warsan Shire; 'To Stacey, As You Were' - Eve Ewing; 'Girl Friend' - C.D. Wright; 'Loose Woman' - Sandra Cisneros*; 'Except for Being, It Was Relatively Painless' - Mary Jo Bang; 'Apocalypse' - Emily Dickinson; 'The Heart of a Woman' - Georgia Douglas Johnson; 'Housekeeping' - Natasha Trethewey; 'Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting...' - Naomi Shihab Nye; 'Autography 8' - Rachel Zucker; 'Great-Grandmother' - Jean Valentine; 'Life's Work' - Rae Armantrout; 'Certainty' - Sandra Lim; 'A Plaint of Complexity' - Eunice Tietjens; '19 (A Girl Sleeps As If)' - Vera Pavlova; 'Body Clock (Excerpt) - Eleni Sikelianos; 'Ego Tripping (There May Be A Reason Why)' - Nikki Giovanni.
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