A night of poetry in Remington! Elizabeth Hazen’s new book, 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.

In Dora Malech’s new book, Flourish, multiple meanings catch light—as the leaves of growing things might, or the facets of cut gemstones, or a signal mirror flashing in distress. These poems explore themes of thriving, growth, innovation, and survival, while immersing the reader in the pleasures of language itself—the “flourish” of linguistic gesture, play, form, turn, and adornment. Here, the lens zooms in and out to micro and macro levels, asking us to see the familiar with new eyes. The collection engages with the materials of the worlds we inhabit—natural worlds and those of our own making—and a full spectrum of poetry’s own materials, building worlds of words and illuminating the shadowed terrain of our interior landscapes as well.

Dora Malech is the author of Flourish (2020), Stet (2018), Say So (2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (2009). In 2019, Eris Press published Soundings, a UK Selected of Malech’s poems and drawings. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, and numerous other publications. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, The Normal School, and other journals. She teaches English at Calvert School in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of Chaos Theories (2016) and Girls Like Us (2020).