Sweet Bone Girl - by Esme Allman (Paperback)

About the Book

Sweet Bone Girl examines the intricate dynamics of desire as it intertwines with Black womanhood, negotiating the boundaries of history, culture, and identity.

Book Synopsis

Sweet Bone Girl examines the intricate dynamics of desire as it intertwines with Black womanhood, negotiating the boundaries of history, culture, and identity. Esme Allman's evocative poetry moves between the personal and the collective, interlacing the past with the present to investigate how desire is shaped and claimed. With striking introspection, Allman interrogates the influence of external forces-family, lovers, popular culture-and asks: where can desire be truly known? And when it is, can it ever be wholly one's own? Bold and poignant, Sweet Bone Girl navigates vulnerability, agency, and the yearning for connection in a world that too often seeks to define rather than understand.

Review Quotes

Poetry which holds language up to the light, its brilliance beaming in every direction. Sweet Bone Girl asks how we perform ourselves-a dazzling choreography of self, desire, and power that swoops high in one step, and brings you to your knees with the next. Allman is a truly original new voice.

- Olivia Douglass

Esme Allman's début is dancerly, in the sense that dancers give themselves to this, but they are not giving themselves to us. On the irreversibility of naming, how being known by your mother is not the same as knowing yourself, on the quest to outrun former versions of ourselves, on shying away from being cast in langour, on self pleasure. I love its ardent sensuality in poems like 'Love Letter'. There is a frenzy in these poems that feel so raw that the sadness hits harder, especially in 'Brat', comfortable in areas of discomfort. Sweet Bone Girl is honest in its lens about the specific experience of biracial middle class-hood as separate from minoritized working class communities, and what that separation implies, in poems like 'Little Rich Girl'. Splitting apart the viscosity of celebrity and performance culture as the video vixon 'My Body Won't Retain the Choreography' and 'The Black Pam-Ann'. Straightforward, conflicted, electric, passionate, naughty, and bittersweet work that thinks about technique in poetry with the intentionality of choreo on the page."

- Tice Cin

Esme Allman has written an extraordinary collection - a fearless yet refined exploration of young womanhood, the body, sex, and sexuality, weaving together themes that are as tender as they are ferocious. The mastery of form is especially impressive, with words on the page bending and weaving in a way that mimics the contradictions inherent in the poems' themes. The prose is alive and as full of energy in the way all good poetry is, with the resulting collection holding onto the complexities of joy and grief, dark and light, and strength and fragility, seemingly all at once. Sweet Bone Girl is a welcome gift to contemporary poetry and Allman is easily one of the UK's most exciting young poets.

- Bridget Minamore,

This collection swells with omnipotence and daring, hollowing out the chest of womanhood and arresting us with limbs, might and a reverence for the sensual. These poems pull us through azure water-scapes, dance choreography, hotels, attics and want, ebbing the parameters of agency, sexuality, fidelity and self-pleasure. Delicious and kinetic, Esme's poems invite us to excavate room in our bodies to plant, feed and prune our desires. Sweet Bone Girl is a precious gem.

- Shanay Neusum-James