Angela Hume Interventions for Women

"Were you raised to be a girl? The kind of girl who grows up to become a woman? Were you shamed for being not girl enough or too much girl? Were you looked at, talked over, touched, fed, psychiatrized, or indoctrinated in ways you didn't want to be or didn't understand? Were you told that if you'd just smile and try to be happy, everything would be better? At a certain point, did you look around and start to see how big the system is that holds you, a system that wants to use you up, along with everyone and everything around you? Did you start to see how it uses you in order to use others, and how you suffer as a consequence of that use while also benefiting from it? Did you start to see how complicit you are in every part of it? Are you sick, grieving, furious, on fire? Did you answer yes to some of these questions? To none of them? Then this book is for you. I wrote this book for you"--
Poems that address cultural pressures placed on women and girls. This is a book for those who were raised to be girls and expected to become women, for those who were told they were too girly and not girly enough, and for those who were ogled, talked over, touched, fed, imagined, and indoctrinated in ways they didn&;t want. Angela Hume writes directly about the experience of womanhood, addressing the boundaries and pressures imposed from childhood on. She considers the persistent instructions to smile, be quiet, and act happy, all administered with the promise that this forced behavior would make everything better. The poems address rigid social norms and, ultimately, walk through the uncomfortable realizations about the bigger systems at play and call on us to examine our own complicity in them.