Try free for 30 days

1 credit a month to use on any title, yours to keep (you’ll use your first credit on this title).
Stream or download thousands of included titles.
Access to exclusive deals and discounts.
$16.45 a month after 30 day trial. Cancel anytime.
Girls That Never Die cover art

Girls That Never Die

By: Safia Elhillo
Narrated by: Safia Elhillo
Try for $0.00

$16.45 per month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $12.99

Buy Now for $12.99

Pay using voucher balance (if applicable) then card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions Of Use and Privacy Notice and authorise Audible to charge your designated credit card or another available credit card on file.

Publisher's Summary

In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power.

Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning:

[what if i will not die]

[what will govern me then]

©2024 Safia Elhillo (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic Reviews

'Girls That Never Die is an incredibly moving, and well-structured collection of poetry about being a Muslim girl, about shame, about the silent hurts women carry, about the pressures of cultural expectations, about dangerous silences.' (ROXANE GAY)

'Safia Elhillo traces the ongoing devastations of patriarchy while simultaneously making a refuge out of language, kinship, and sound. Electric, violet, plural with girls, this work pulses with memory and refusal, awakening language with its lucid imagination. Girls That Never Die is a book of resuscitations. Brilliant. And fierce.' (ARACELIS GIRMAY, author of The Black Maria)

'I am rapt, finding here the hurt and the heft of girlhood. All the old silences, all the unuttered shames are ruptured, tended to, and - finally - named. Elhillo is a poet of wisdom, rigor, and vindicating care. Girls That Never Die is an astonishment.' (TRACY K. SMITH, author of Ordinary Light and Wade in the Water)

What listeners say about Girls That Never Die

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.