![]() At once unflinching and fragile, For Your Own Good is a collection with transformation at its heart. In this reflection on grief, silence and community, we follow the narrator’s own journey as she explores what it is to survive, to change, to desire and to hope. But Horlick also draws from a legacy of feminist, Jewish and lesbian writers against violence: epigraphs from the works of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt act as touchstones alongside references to contemporary writers, such as Daphne Gottlieb and Michelle Tea. These poems are acutely painful, rooted in singular and firsthand experiences. There is magic in this work: the symbolism of the Tarot and the roots of Jewish heritage, but also the magic that is at the heart of transformation and survival. A fictionalized autobiography, the poems in this collection illustrate the narrator’s survival of domestic and sexual violence in a lesbian relationship. In the canon of contemporary feminist and lesbian poetry, For Your Own Good breaks silence. For Your Own Good is a startling combination of the two, skillful poems both defiant and self-aware, and close to my femme heart. “Sometimes it feels as though there are Poems About Important Issues and Good Poems, and the two camps rarely meet. ![]() ![]() ![]() “Leah Horlick’s For Your Own Good may be the best book of poetry to come out of Canada this year.” –Michael Dennis A 2016 STONEWALL HONOUR TITLE in Literature. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |