Instead, “It takes us years before we realize how many / things will make us bleed, how easy / for the world to rip us to pieces.” In the title poem (really a series of five), the persona recalls “The nurse (distributing) pamphlets about / life cycles and Kotex,” and brochures featuring “the beautiful fresh-faced / girl, blonde hair swept back with pink satin ribbon,” she and other young women are asked to emulate. In Reading Like a Girl, she reconnoiters the world – yielding fine poems on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the Serbian repression of Albanian Kosovo – but also personal pieces connecting literature and lived experience. Goran Simic, author of Immigrant Blues and Sprinting from the Graveyardĭunlop’s phrasing…can spur leaps of the heart she’s a writer whose passion and large-spiritedness are inspiring.īorn in India, but raised in Ottawa and Anglo-Quebec, Rishma Dunlop has experienced decolonization on two continents. This is poetry that has the smell of ink and the smell of skin, as Dunlop writes: “a poetry of shine.” Rishma Dunlop speaks eloquently from the perspective of a witness as much as a participant, bringing us into a world one can’t be immune to. Guided by the heart of a girl and written by the hand of an experienced poet, the lyrical meditations in Reading Like a Girl take us on a journey through a poet’s life, storied and mediated by the texts she reads. If there is a precipice at which language, especially its lyrical form, must hover, in order for one to feel dangerously alive and subsequently on the verge of death, then Toronto poet Rishma Dunlop takes us there, seducing us with a relentless passion for the intangible beauty wrought visible in “objects” cathected with reverence and desire.Ī Round, Full Moment: Review of Rishma Dunlop’s Reading Like a Girl Reviews and Praise for Reading Like a Girl An essential book from an uncompromising voice.

From the childhood book that “thumbs her open” to the post-9/11 classroom in which she must somehow bring meaning to “rows of firemen’s boots abandoned,” Dunlop’s brilliant language explores what it means to learn and teach in an increasingly violent and fractured global landscape. In Reading Like a Girl, award-winning poet Rishma Dunlop blends the autobiographical with the imagined to produce an evocative collection of 21st-century poetry.

Reading Like A Girl by Rishma Dunlop