Review & Giveaway: Girls Like Us by Elizabeth Hazen

Source: Review copy from publisher

Elizabeth Hazen’s Girls Like Us is a collection of poems that packs a punch from the start. (You can read the collection’s opening poem, “Devices,” and Hazen’s inspiration in last week’s guest post.)

Hazen writes about the power of language, and that power radiates through every poem in the collection. These poems are honest and brave, shocking and edgy without feeling forced. There’s a heaviness to these poems, but moments of empowerment as well.

As a woman, it was hard not to feel like the narrator was telling my story.

What simplicity
to be as silence or as air — there yet

not there. But it takes such work to disappear,
and secrets threaten to spill from you like liquor
you can’t hold. You tell yourself you’re someone else.

(from “Against Resignation”)

 

How do words —
lacking form beyond the curve of font, the flick

of tongue, the measure of my breathing — break,
so easily, a bond?

(from “Diamond”)

There were many poems like these, where a line would just hit me in the gut and I recognized myself on the page. The narrator’s experience is not exactly my own, yet I understand, have felt that precise feeling.

Know that your body may be numb awhile,

and when you see yourself revealed in paint,
note the proportions, but ignore the faint

glimmer he put in your eye that isn’t you.

(from “Times from a Nude Model”)

Hazen’s poems are personal yet universal, strong yet vulnerable, and she deftly packs so much emotion and meaning into a few words.

and though she scrapes away the corrosion, a new battery is not
enough, and the hours pass, though not exactly as before.

(from “The Clock”)

Girls Like Us is a collection of poems that begs to be read multiple times. I spent a few hours with these poems and took away so much, yet I feel I only scratched the surface. Hazen’s unflinching take on the female experience is one that I won’t soon forget.

****

Giveaway

Two copies of Girls Like Us are up for grabs as part of the blog tour. To enter, you must use this Rafflecopter link. The giveaway runs July 24, 2020. You must be 18 or older and have a U.S. mailing address to qualify.

****

Click the button below for more information about the book and the author, and to follow the blog tour.