Girl, Discovered

How can we not admire the "girl discovered" within Frances McConnel's richly imagined and moving poems, who takes us on such intimate inner journeys, proving herself to be passionate, defiant, tender, daring, vulnerable, rebellious, wise, and all too human? Girl, Discovered is a remarkable book illuminating the rites of passage from girlhood through adolescence. It's enlivened by luminous or fraught moments drawn from childhood, and it's weighted with the gravitas, confusion, and terrors of growing up. With as much anticipation as dread and wonder, the eleven-year-old girl in one poem asks, "Where did it come from '...this werewolfness of me waiting to spring forth?'"

-Maurya Simon, author of Ghost Orchid, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems

"Oh, Father, a childhood's a lost and lonely vessel," writes Frances Ruhlen McConnel in Girl, Discovered. That discovery is the Self, and the gifted McConnel is able to bring it to us on the wings of both memory and the imagination despite rumors of their opposition ever since Blake and Coleridge. Girl, Discovered is a moving and masterful contribution to the poetry of the family.

-B.H. Fairchild, author of The Art of the Lathe; The Blue Buick, New and Selected Poems

It may be true, as Frances Ruhlen McConnel writes in a haunting poem, that "a childhood's a lost and lonely vessel." Nevertheless, the lovely autobiographical poems of Girl, Discovered bring a vibrant world to life. When she was a child her father worked on the Manhattan Project in Tennessee, and she writes of camping trips and persimmons and turtles. In her adolescence, the family moved to Alaska where, her mother tells her, "pee will freeze in mid-air" and where she snuggles down against the wolverine fur of her second-hand parka, McConnel unforgettably conjures "memories of memories like the winking of fireflies." This is a collection to treasure-and I will.

-Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of Mississippi, The Bones of Winter Birds