Eileen O’Toole • Excerpts from Girl

Excerpts from Girl, by Eileen O’Toole, is a spare, lyrical book that captures the otherworldliness of childhood, the strangeness and beauty of it, but also the sadness and loneliness, and strong spiritual affinity. The brevity of the prose poems parallel the brevity of childhood, and the way memory often returns in unattached fragments. A powerful book — layered and evocative.

In the grocery store she lost her mother

began to cross the ends of aisles searching for her coat. To

calm herself she thought, What’s the worst thing that could

happen? I could die, she remembered, then nothing would matter.

And she closed her hand around that, let it anchor her.

From Excerpts from Girl, by Eileen O’TOole

About Eileen

Eileen O’Toole lives in St. Paul and has had poems published in Water~Stone. Her first collection of poems, Excerpts from Girl, was published by Laurel in August of 2006. Eileen is also a letterpress printer and one of the Collective’s broadside artists.

Eileen on Writing Poetry

Attention is key. Our attention, I believe, is what the world needs, what people need, what poems need.

From The Double Meaning of Yield: Laurel Poets on Writing Poetry