If Organic Deodorant Was Made for Dancing

Virginia Kane

A debut collection of poems that explore queer girlhood, embodiment, faith, femme friendships, teenage love, and coming-of-age across urban and suburban settings.

Published in the Spring 2019 Collection.

  • “Virginia Kane's poems are the mulberries that grow in your backyard – small and sweet, a reminder of where you come from, and leave your hands looking bloody when you're done. What I'm saying is, Kane's poems are both delicious and brutal. Here, she gives us a supercut of girlhood – the drugstore beauty aisle and Seventeen magazine – and then moves seamlessly into the larger questions of womanhood – what it means to have a relationship to God, love, death, and family. Kane's story is compelling, but her craft stands just as strong. Her line breaks are precise and speak volumes, illuminating that Kane is set on teaching the reader how to consume work. Hers is a voice that should not be underestimated.”

    OLIVIA GATWOOD, author of Life of the Party and New American Best Friend

  • "It is exhilarating to experience such clear vision: the young woman at the center of Virginia Kane's poems is in the act of reestablishing the space her body and her voice might inhabit in a world in which she already had these words. There is a sense of the abiding beauty in everything from the hidden shapes and markings and odors of the body, to dark reflections of the materiality that lives, somehow, alongside spirituality. These poems are as unflinching as they are forceful – I never put them down once."

    KEITH S. WILSON, author of Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love

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A Shoebox of Sparrows | Spring 2019