There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die - by Tove Ditlevsen

Book Synopsis

By the acclaimed author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, a startling and darkly funny volume of selected poetry, the first to be translated into English.

From one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers, the author of the acclaimed Copenhagen Trilogy, comes There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, a major volume of selected poetry written throughout Tove Ditlevsen's life. Infused with the same wry nihilism, quiet intensity, dark humor, and crystalline genius that readers savor in her prose, these are heartbreak poems, childhood poems, self-portraits, death poems, wounded poems, confessional poems, and love poems--poems that stare into the surfaces that seduce and deceive us. They describe childhood, longing, loss, and memory, obsessively tracing their imprints and intrusions upon everyday life. With morbid curiosity, Ditlevsen's poems turn toward the uncanny and the abject, approaching daily disappointment with vivid, unsparing detail.

Speaking across generations to both the passions of youth and the agonies of adulthood, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die reveals everyday life stripped of its excesses, exposing its bones and bare qualities: the meaningful and the meaningless. These startling, resonant poems are both canonical and contemporary, and demand to be shared with friends, loved ones, nemeses, and strangers alike.

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

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