Weird Girl: Poems (The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize)

Poems that confront faith, sexuality, mother-daughter relationships, and the patriarchy to celebrate weird girls everywhere. Amy Thatcher’s Weird Girl recasts female saints as quirky, transgressive characters, examines the sometimes-bizarre landscape of American girlhood, reckons with classism and self-definition on the fringes of acceptability. With gusto and humor, Thatcher confronts the taboo―the intrusive, macabre, violent, obsessive, and lonely. Rooted in a working-class Philadelphia Catholic upbringing and embracing the unconventional and the unrefined, this collection captures the experiences of a first-generation college student, the grief of losing a difficult mother, the grandeur and swoon of religious ecstasy, and a girl’s struggle against systems of male power. Weird Girl is a collection for the dreamers, the oddballs, and the resilient ones who have learned to thrive in their own offbeat light: where vulnerability is strength, and the most authentic stories are often the most peculiar.