Girl as Birch: Poems

Gibson's previous book Opinel, starts and ends on the image of a workaday knife used by shepherds, peasants, and artists, using her sensitive and critical eye to explore family, culture, nature, and the world we inhabit. In Girl as Birch, Gibson turns her attention to the experience of growing up as a girl in the United States, coming of age while pushing against expectations for what a girl should be. The title poem uses the image of a birch tree to describe the pressure to bend to what ot...