Girls Like Us is packed with fierce, eloquent, and deeply intelligent
poetry focused on female identity and the contradictory personas women
are expected to embody. The women in these poems sometimes fear and
sometimes knowingly provoke the male gaze. At times, they try to
reconcile themselves to the violence that such attentions may bring; at
others, they actively defy it. Hazen's insights into the conflict
between desire and wholeness, between self and self-destruction, are
harrowing and wise. The predicaments confronted in Girls Like Us are
age-old and universal--but in our current era, Hazen's work has a
particular weight, power, and value.