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by Kate Gough (Author)
Girlhood Lore is a poetry collection that enters the symbolic worlds we build as girls - dolls, fairy tales, saints, domestic rituals - and asks what they were really preparing us for.
Kate Gough writes with precision and restraint about girlhood, chronic illness, violence, survival, and the body as both archive and battleground. These poems draw on myth, folklore, and cultural memory, not to romanticise suffering, but to name it honestly. What emerges is a body of work that honours tenderness without softening its edges, and grief without turning it into spectacle.
Throughout the collection, familiar figures - Persephone, Ophelia, saints, dolls, witches - are re-examined through lived experience. Girlhood is presented not as innocence lost, but as a formative intelligence: a way of understanding danger, care, imagination, and endurance long before language was available.
This is a book for readers who recognise themselves in quiet resilience rather than triumph narratives. For those who live with illness, who have learned to navigate the world through intuition and adaptation, and for anyone interested in contemporary feminist poetry that refuses neat conclusions.
Published by Sunday Mornings at the River, Girlhood Lore is a collection that treats memory, myth, and the body with seriousness and respect - and trusts the reader to do the same.
