There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die: Selected Poems

Description: "Selected poems by the celebrated Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen"--Provided by publisher.

Brief description: Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties and was followed by many more books, including the three volumes of the Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), and Dependency (1971). She died in 1976.

Review Quotes:

"These poems--drawn from several of the revered Danish writer's collections and published together in English for the first time--are tinged with the longing of Ditlevsen's inner child . . . [She] injects mournful omniscience into explorations of heartache . . . What is recovered through the writer's deceptively plain language, confined in her earlier work by rhymed verse but free from form in later years, is her yearning for 'Protection / against every kind / of desire.'" --The New Yorker

"With the newly selected poems, anglophone readers who came to know Ditlevsen through the Trilogy will feel a strong sense of familiarity, delight, and allegiance . . . Translators Hersi Smith and Russell render the persistent intensity, deepening tone, and gradually shifting forms of Ditlevsen's work with the immersiveness of a ghost story, converting this Selected Poems into a nimble page-turner . . . We can clutch There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die to our chests, just as young Ditlevsen held to the miracle of her Poetry Album." --Joyelle McSweeney, The Poetry Foundation

"[Ditlevsen] is never done with the complex dance between who she used to be and who she is now . . . She manages to make this chain of exchange livelier, darker, and stranger than many discussions of trauma do . . . Her poems read, at their best, like illuminations, transfiguring her life again and again." --Sophie Haigney, The Sunday Telegraph

"Though Ditlevsen is primarily known--at least in America--as a memoirist, she was first a poet . . . She wrote with a capacious eye forever turned toward the mundane, the difficult, the dirt and grit of life, the things that a worker cannot afford to ignore. Through the sensitivity of her prose and her unadorned speech, coupled with an unflinching gaze toward the smallest of circumstances, she renders dirt, grit, experiences both difficult and often unsayable, into things of beauty." --Annette Lepique, Newcity Lit

"We were all mesmerized by Tove Ditlevsen's short novel-like-memoirs, Copenhagen Trilogy, that came out in early 2021 . . . Prepare for the same "wry nihilism, quiet intensity, dark humor, and crystalline genius" that made her memoirs utterly absorbing." --LitHub