Girl Work – Zefyr Lisowski

Poet and essayist Zefyr Lisowski’s prize-winning book GIRL WORK, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, GIRL WORK challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout GIRL WORK, a self is restored from the detritus of memory–flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.

Winner of Lambda Literary Award (Lammy) for Transgender Poetry.