Books by Leia Penina Wilson

"Answering a call to go feral, these poems are part invocation, part prayer, elevating the confessional by exploring the nature of confession from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. A pop surreal romp reckoning with lyric buoyancy through a mythic apocalypse, mysteriously stark and playful. We meet voices trying to survive, reconcile their own belonging, maybe, that drop in and out of a mystic narrative. What happens in the aftermath of brutality? What do you do? The poems begin to break down even their own authority. The landscape is itself too unsettled; the form varies and reflects this endless transformation of embodiment and interrogation. What can be recovered, if anything, through an uninterrupted interrogation of memory, category, and language-an unbroken attention to the speaker's own authority. Creating an architecture and landscape that expresses both a ruination of cultural time and an eternity of interior time, confession and lyric become as much about the I as the you/we"--

The wildly unrestrained poems in Splinters Are Children of Wood, Leia Penina Wilson's second collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, pose an increasingly desperate question about what it means to be a girl, the ways girls are shaped by the world, as well as the role myth plays in this coming of age quest.