[I AM RAISING]

Jennifer Givhan

I am raising       a daughter
                                 a nation
                                 a knife
the animal nuzzled my neck
it drew blood & in the blood
across my chest spelled an animal language it took
a life to learn

In the closet I girled into a demon
[a woman with a girldemon in her belly]
& the devil whispered—

As a mother I’ve realized, too late, it was
memory, where could I have learned sex-
ualization unless it was carved
into the closets of the girl I’ve buried

I memorized every letter of the bible
& still I hurt & still the wound bleeds

I am raising       a wasp’s nest
                                 a sharp organ
                                 a sting that won’t retract

I’ve ripped her from the humid biome of insects
caressing our bellies & fed her thickened milk

I am raising a stake to the fat heart

The night she fevered toward the otherworld
Mama I can’t do this & I commanded Yes you can
I am raising a warrior

When a man
ungauzed the woundgirl the girlwound
the sticky rot place inside
I wouldn’t let her see me falling apart
The daughter holds an ostrich feather to her mouth
& from her lips flower truths

[blooming toward everyone with ears] they sow

eggs in their palms & when they hatch
only the blood

of girls unbelieved
we know our calling

We came upon the ghostflowered grave[less]
plaque for the girl our city calls Victoria
whose mother & her mother’s beasts
undid the one creature in this world
God decreed she keep safe

I see Victoria in every field in every open space
remade in God’s image as if her methed-out mother
had never vultured her girlbody, petal by petal—
Victoria visits me some nights & tells me she’s
slaying beasts in the otherplace where the girlwounds

arrive for healing

She shows me her map
& promises to lead me there someday too

I am raising        a dead girl
                                 a voice
                                a voice
                                a voice
                                 a voice

Hush. Victoria is singing. Can you hear

her knifeflower song?

Feature Date

December 13, 2023

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Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices.

She is the author of five full-length poetry collections and three novels, most recently Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press) and River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing) which draw from her practice of brujería. Her latest novel was chosen for Amazon’s Book Club and as a National Together We Read Library Pick and was featured on CBS Mornings. It also won a Silver Medal for the International Latino Book Award in the Rudolfo Anaya Latino-Focused Fiction category.

Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, Ploughshares, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, among many others.

Givhan is currently the Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at The University of New Mexico.

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Belly to the Brutal

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown , Connecticut

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"In Belly to the Brutal, Jennifer Givhan explores the questions of gender, language, and motherhood. These are precarious and gorgeous poems, stylistically varied and image-drenched—a speaker who's an adjunct teacher living in her car, a mother who discovers an unexplained bruise on her daughter's arm and seeks its source, the little-known Mexican woman painter who inspired Frida Kahlo. With the dark humor of a good witch, Givhan offers the 'hallelujah hellflowering' we've been needing."
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

"Belly to the Brutal is a collection of raw and mystical materialism in its exploration of motherhood's continuum: from creation to destruction. The frankness is profound and inspiring, the lyric voice lucid. Givhan gets at the eros and terror of being mother through a harrowing excavation into her body's history. Her poems remind me of Frida Kahlo's flayed and ecstatic self-portraits. I love this book with my salt."
—Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Be Recorder

"To enter Belly to the Brutal, Jennifer Givhan's fifth full-length poetry collection, is to buckle into a whirlwind. Part self-reckoning, part spell, part enchantment, this is a book that speaks as easily of the real-life repo man as it does a forest of magical nopales. Through lyric, narrative, and many experimental forms, Givhan confronts misogyny, poverty, and generational trauma. ...Praise for Jenn Givhan, who sees all the muck and misery, winds it into startling, incantatory music, and nonetheless persists."
—Emily Pérez, Rhino Poetry

"I've just read your new poetry book, Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press, July 2022), and I feel like it's been inhabiting me in the days since. In some ways I identify deeply with your subjects: you write about parenting, adjunct teaching, and the precarious feeling of being a woman and mother in our time."
—Rachel Richardson, Adroit Journal

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