A GIRL WHO WAS HIS HOUSE
Poetry
By Sarah-Jean Krahn
A Girl Who was His House is a collection of experimental poetry centering on themes of feminism, political agency, and madness, penned by Canadian writer Sarah-Jean Krahn. (Gothic Funk Press, February 14, 2021, Poetry, $14.00 USD, $18.00 CAD, Trade Paperback).
A virtual launch event, moderated by writer and editor Elisabeth Blair will be hosted at 7:30 pm Mountain Time on Valentines Day, that is, Thursday, February 14th. Attendance is free and the public is cordially invited. Details at http://gothicfunkpress.com/blog/krahnlaunch.
Praised by author Clara A. B. Joseph as “experimental poetry at its decadent best,” A Girl Who was His House offers up a cast-iron innovation of courage in women’s writing that howls a cacophony of both the (im)personal and political. Krahn’s forceful experimental voice illuminates a body and elucidates a mind steeped in the madness brewed by a (f)rigid patriarchy.
Stark and sassy images illustrate the chaos of a woman’s selfhood infected by old traumas. The landscape around her is warped into twisted triggers that are yet absurd, sarcastic: “books ooze with thickredfoldedhalfwaysjam” as she marvels at execution videos against crimson cloud-cover and “moonwalks past the whole ‘whore’ aspect.”
Gothic Funk Press is an independent publishing company based in Flint, Michigan. The Press promotes experimental work marked by the scars of romance, darkness, depth, and swagger.
A Girl Who was His House will be Gothic Funk Press’s first poetry publication.
Below please find:
Praise for A Girl Who Was His House
About the Author
Excerpt from A Girl Who Was His House
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Praise for A Girl Who Was His House:
“Sarah-Jean Krahn’s second book of poetry is a startling collection where meaning arrives at the cusp of word-shifts and mind-shifts to shock, surprise, reveal, and simply tell the tale of a girl who thrives in the cracks of God’s-and-man’s sidewalks. A Girl Who Was His House is experimental poetry at its decadent best—eerily political, sharply responsible, tearful and fun-filled. Krahn is a gift to Canadian Literature.”
-Clara A. B. Joseph, author
of The Face of the Other
“A Girl Who Was His House sweeps us behind a turtle shell of piercing, witty barbs, a map of ‘her education at home.’ An insidious schooling where he ‘watched you hours.’ Sarcasm, small recourse for the powerless, overwhelms ‘in the numbness of his medicine.’ Still, Sarah-Jean Krahn, the poet, resuscitates and shows us what resilience and braveness means.”
-Elaine Woo, author of
Put Your Hand in Mine and
Cycling with the Dragon
“A Girl Who Was His House continues Krahn’s relentless linguistic and narrative deconstruction of the abject (first begun in Weed Apologue), in which the alienation wrought on the latent female self by the forces of patriarchy leads to a riotous reckoning between the imagination’s take on desire and connection and that of language as it seals and unseals ever changing bodies that resist easy definition.”
-Emily Cargan, writer,
researcher, and educator
“A Girl Who Was His House is ferocious, vulnerable, and bold–examining the female experience in bursts of words that not only challenge predictable syntax but deliver language like an avenging angel opening her wings to sound and sense. Sometimes the poems hit like a punch to the gut, sometimes they whisper, grieve, protest, indict. And always the passion of the poems centers in the female body, its beauty and perils, and rage at how it has been violated by male domination and abuse. While Krahn documents that primal pain, sometimes stuttering, crying out or celebrating, she wields her words with a sword of fearlessness, a weapon remade into female might, powerfully female, borne from the uterus, ovaries, clitoris — the sexual body formidable, forthright and from within, offering not just exuberant survival but, it must be said, joy.”
-Jan Worth-Nelson, author of Night Blind
“Sarah-Jean Krahn’s A Girl Who Was His House repurposes the female body and the domestic in a way that cannot be appropriated by patriarchy. She does indeed, ‘Reclaim this space from your misery,’ in a powerful and innovative articulation of female subjectivity and resistance.”
-Katherine Davis, author
of The Anger Poems
“Sarah-Jean Krahn’s rich, lyrical collection confronts living and longing with a playful danger that dances across the page like a knife’s edge.”
-Nic Custer, author of
Nothing Works, Everyone Labors
About the Author:
Sarah-Jean Krahn is the co-founder of S/tick and has acted as Managing Editor since its inception in 2012. She is passionate about feminist writing, especially that which flagrantly breaks from the norm in terms of both content and form. She is the author of Weed Apologue (words(on)pages, 2017), a chapbook about the intersections between colonization, the destruction of the earth, and violence against women. She hopes A Girl Who Was His House will inspire other writers and artists dis-eased by the patriarchy to (int)erupt the experimental literary cosmos with their traumas and resolutions.
Treaty 6 land is where Sarah-Jean gratefully resides. She shares a humble home with a beloved cat, dog, human, and snail in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Beaver Hill House), traditional meeting ground for many Indigenous nations, including the Cree, Saulteaux, Nakota Sioux, Blackfoot and Métis Peoples. Sarah-Jean has long worked as a student support in post-secondary education, aiming to inspire confidence and love of writing in those who struggle with it.
Excerpt: