What keeps a kind girl alive in the wild? The men in town
are crapshoots, sawbucks, coins striking heads and tails.

This searing collection of poems confronts how socially ingrained violence and sexual power dynamics distort and dislocate girlhood, womanhood, and relationships. Startling and visceral, the poems in What Hurts Going Down deconstruct a lifetime of survival, hover in the uneasy territory of pre- and post- #MeToo, and scrutinize the changing wagers of being female.

Nancy talks to CBC’s Shelagh Rogers on The Next Chapter

“Hard-hitting and incisive, this is a gut-punch of a book.”
- Barb Carey, The Toronto Star

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