Details: Smoke Girl is a study in loss: of body, safety, and identity. It interrogates the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of fat, Black, femme bodies. Instead of forgetting, Simone Person breaks the silences and shame embedded in the murky aftermath of sexual assault, employing the voices of victim, perpetrator, and spectator throughout.
Simone Person’s poetry is not for everyone; it is not for the cowardly or the two-faced. Her poetry will look you in the eye and exhale thick truth that will either warm you or choke you. – Rachel Wiley
In Smoke Girl, Simone Person documents the anguish and loss of sexual violence; these poems weave a narrative of wound and scar, the ritual of a fist clenched and released. Speaking from and to several voices, Smoke Girl potently illustrates the wraith of trauma, how it disrupts and disturbs memory and time. These words render devastation, through its avenues and histories, as tangible on the page; Person is an observant and empathetic writer, one whose gorgeous work I am honored to know. – Yasmin Belkhyr
Simone Person grew up in small Michigan towns and Toledo, Ohio. She is a Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat 2018 Fellow and author of Dislocate, the prose winner of Honeysuckle Press’s 2017 Chapbook Contest. She is currently an MFA/MA in Fiction and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.
