What It Feels Like for a Girl

'What It Feels Like for a Girl' is a book-length series of poems that tell the story of two teenage girls as they delve into the big, strange world of sex. 'What It Feels Like for a Girl' is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its "lessons" for the young woman who has never experienced sex in an unfiltered way. What sex and love have to do with each other-if anything. How confusing desire can be. How so many things inthis world are two things at once-thirteen is both young and old, Madonna is both the virgin and the whore, pornography is both arousing and terrifying. How teenage girls (like pornography, literature, art) hold a mirror up to the world and show it its true beautiful, and ugly face. The girls have the kind of friendship only teenage girls have-intense, raw, dependent, playful, and emotional. And beneath the friendship is an attraction for one another, which one girl perceives as love, and the other believes to be a benign crush-nothing of any substance. "Smart, brave, hard-edged, and a little frightening...Jennica Harper offers a compassionate glimpse into the turbulent lives of teenaged girls. May this book find its way to school libraries. May it find itself in the hands of every young person who ever wondered 'What It Feels Like for a Girl'." -Elizabeth Bachinsky

''What It Feels Like for a Girl'' is a book-length series of poems that tell the story of two teenage girls as they delve into the big, strange world of sex. ''What It Feels Like for a Girl'' is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its "lessons" for the young woman who has never experienced sex in an unfiltered way. What sex and love have to do with each other-if anything. How confusing desire can be. How so many things inthis world are two things at once-thirteen is both young and old, Madonna is both the virgin and the whore, pornography is both arousing and terrifying. How teenage girls (like pornography, literature, art) hold a mirror up to the world and show it its true beautiful, and ugly face. The girls have the kind of friendship only teenage girls have-intense, raw, dependent, playful, and emotional. And beneath the friendship is an attraction for one another, which one girl perceives as love, and the other believes to be a benign crush-nothing of any substance. "Smart, brave, hard-edged, and a little frightening...Jennica Harper offers a compassionate glimpse into the turbulent lives of teenaged girls. May this book find its way to school libraries. May it find itself in the hands of every young person who ever wondered ''What It Feels Like for a Girl''." -Elizabeth Bachinsky