What Hurts Going Down Poems

A searing exploration of girlhood in the pre- and post- #MeToo eras from the acclaimed novelist.

CBC Best Canadian Poetry of 2020
 
 
What keeps a kind girl alive in the wild? The men in town
are crapshoots, sawbucks, coins striking heads and tails.

Nancy Lee's searing collection of poems confronts how socially ingrained violence and sexual power dynamics distort and dislocate girlhood, womanhood, and relationships. Startling and visceral, the poems in What Hurts Going Down deconstruct a lifetime of survival, hover in the uneasy territory of pre- and post- #MeToo, and scrutinize the changing wagers of being female.

Hailed by the Globe and Mail as "a masterwork of revelation and catharsis," Nancy Lee's first book, Dead Girls was the winner of the VanCity Book Prize, as well as a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Pearson Readers' Choice Award, and the Wordsworthy Award. The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Vancouver Sun chose Dead Girls as one of the best books of the year, and Now Magazine named it Book of the Year. The Vancouver Sun described The Age, Lee's second book, a novel about adolescence, sexual identity, and nuclear war, as "utterly transfixing." Lee's work has been published in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. She has served as Visiting Canadian Fellow for the University of East Anglia, and as Writer-in-Residence for Historic Joy Kogawa House, the City of Richmond and Ville de Vincennes, France. Lee holds the position of Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and is co-creator of the popular EdX online education series, "How to Write a Novel."