LoPaperback, 24 May 2023

Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman--tender, hungry, hopeful--who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack--poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book's early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.