Bad Daughter [Paperback]

Bad Daughter explores misbehaviorits risky pleasures and often tragic consequencesthrough poems about bad daughters, sisters, and their mothers. What happens to the sister who obeys? What if a daughter refuses her inheritance? Can she? What sanctuary and what limits do worship and domesticity provide? Gorham adopts several lyric formsmorality tales, ironic prayers, scaled-down sonnets, sharp meditations on concepts such as envy, detachment, and immortalityto show that the self as forged by generations of women and girls is both subversive and enduring.

It is true when a girl sinks, her hair spreads like a flower / across water

Award winning poet SARAH GORHAM has published three previous collections. She is the director of Sarabande Books in Louisville.

Bust of a Young Girl in the Snow When we were good we were... Immortality Birthday Doppelg?nger Prick and Twinge Electret High Tea Soakaway Salon Barbeque Ice Storm Passeggiata Scaffold for a Sonnet We Are Bold to Say Floaters The end of illness is the end of metaphor Our House Sixteen The Sacrifice After Pindar Accommodation Vague You Bother Me Envy Prayer during a Fast Red Mulberry Homesickness Floater Pounce Tin Drumming After the Accident Loose Thread Follow Sigh Detach Compost Bob White A Ha Ha Fence Pond in Winter Three Sides to the Mountain That Are Really One Juncture Lost Parting Prayer Dusk Floating City This or That On the Birth of a Daughter