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Girlfriend

Barbara Henning

Paper: ISBN 979-8-9913377-0-0 $18

93 Pages

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Girlfriend is a collection of poetic prose, stories about the girls and women who were important in Henning’s life, beginning in childhood through her older years, including mentors, characters and authors whose writing was important to her. The collection of stories is a celebration of her friendships with women. One by one, the story emerges of a working-class girl who loses her mother as an adolescent, becomes a mother herself, as well as a poet, a novelist and a professor. In Henning’s friendship world––the bohemian communities in Detroit and New York City––one meets artists, poets, fiction writers, literary critics, activists, mothers, yoga practitioners and teachers, among many others.

What critics say:

Often the lives of ordinary and extraordinary women are unseen and vanish from history. In this moving, beautiful book, Barbara Henning captures the delicate web of female friendships: intense, sometimes fragile, frequently sculpted by time and circumstance.”
-Maggie Dubris, BrokeDown Palace

“There’s a secret spiral at this book’s throbbing center: the mother-wound as a defining moment as well as a biographical footnote in a much larger life. Oscillating between the very tender and the very cool, Henning pays homage to the constellation of women who have touched her life. She writes, “I was lucky to be a writer and reader” and after reading Girlfriend, I feel lucky, too.”
-Lisa Rogal, la belle indifference