The Heiress/Ghost Acres

Find the Girl] brings contemporary sensationalism into focus, raising (but not answering) many of the moral questions most poets don’t ask.” —Molossus “This first book by Lightsey Darst moves the reader to consider unspeakable crimes against girls—not from the perpetrator’s point of view so often portrayed in salacious TV dramas, but from a deeply personal stance that becomes an elegy for girlhood. . . . Most remarkably, these poems give us a chance to see the fine line between the girls we have been ourselves and the lost girls who never became women. . . . It is in her sensual language that these poems gain our hard-won interest.” —Cerise Press “Bluegrass and teen lust, the sequels to horror films and the modernist fragment, perennial myth and murder mystery, all erupt into Lightsey Darst’s serious poems. . . . Playing hooky, playing dead, playing ‘an instrument built from her body,’ Darst is playing with fire: her verse lights up the night sky.” —Stephanie Burt “Find the Girl is a book of poems as urgent as its title. . . . Here we have an important new poetic voice, one that fully earns Louis Zukofsky’s observation that, in poetry, ‘Each word itself is an arrangement / The story must exist in each word or it cannot go on.’ Lightsey Darst has internalized this, practiced it, perfected it, and brought it to us in this incredible collection. She has done something truly new.” —Laura Kasischke “We should not lie about life. Find the Girl, in its violent intricacies unearthed by the hand of a poet dutiful to the women and girls long lost from poetry, knows this. . . . Find the Girl is an important, ravaging debut.” —Katie Ford