Buy the Book: BlazeVOX, Amazon
Published by: BlazeVOX [books]
Release Date: April, 2023
Pages: 88
ISBN13: 978-1-60964-409-3

 
Overview

Girls' Book of Knots is a collection of contemporary poetry written in a variety of forms and styles including, lyric, narrative, erasure, blackout, prose and found. In the introduction, Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press, describes Girls' Book of Knots as, "one of those rare books that has the ability to look both forward and backward, to expand what is possible within familiar forms — the lyric, couplets, tercets — while working faultlessly within their strictures."

Inspired by the preeminent twentieth-century knotting encyclopedia, The Ashley Book of Knots, Harryman's Girls' Book of Knots is a metaphoric instruction manual that critiques and warns of the patriarchal systems that keep women and men bound to harmful roles related to power and oppression.

The book is both love letter and indictment woven from stories of childhood and parenthood set against the backdrops of a rural Kentucky upbringing and a transplanted adult existence in Los Angeles.

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Praise

“In these concisely crafted poems, Harryman brilliantly uses The Ashley Book of Knots to reimagine the knot as not the binding of one to their oppression and oppressors, ‘many grip the rope,’ but ‘like a branch the blight had not yet reached, one that could still be cut away.’”
—Tyree Daye, author of Cardinal (Copper Canyon, 2020)

“With a sharp, tender eye for life’s beauty and brutality, K.D. Harryman’s Girls’ Book of Knots, is an instruction manual on how to survive the tightly knotted world of girlhood.”
—Vandana Khanna, author of Burning Like Her Own Planet (Alice James Books, 2023)

“One of the most complete, compelling books I’ve read in a long time.”
—Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy (Wayne State University Press, 2021)