What It Feels Like for a Girl is a series of poems following the intense friendship between two teenagers as they explore pop icons, pornography, and the big, strange world of sex. They soon learn just how complicated sexuality is—and how confusing desire can be.
What It Feels Like for a Girl is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its “lessons” for the young woman who has never experienced sex in an unfiltered way. What sex and love have to do with each other—if anything. How so many things in this world are two things at once (thirteen is both young and old, Madonna is both the virgin and the whore, pornography is both arousing and terrifying). How teenage girls (like pornography, literature, art) hold a mirror up to the world and show it its true, beautiful, and ugly face.
“Smart, brave, hard-edged, and a little frightening…Jennica Harper offers a compassionate glimpse into the turbulent lives of teenaged girls. May this book find its way to school libraries. May it find itself in the hands of every young person who ever wondered What It Feels Like for a Girl.” —Elizabeth Bachinsky
Jennica Harper is the author of three previous books of poetry: Wood (Anvil Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay prize, What It Feels Like for a Girl (Anvil Press, 2008), and The Octopus and Other Poems (Signature Editions, 2006). Her poetry has been translated for the stage (Initiation Trilogy), gone viral, and won Silver at the National Magazine Awards. Jennica also writes for television, and lives with her family in Vancouver.
