Brittney Corrigan
Daughters

This collection reimagines characters from mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture from the perspective of their daughters—daughters we don’t expect such individuals to have, as we don’t usually think of Bigfoot, the Mad Hatter, or Medusa as parents.

The persona poems in Daughters give voice to the guilt, resentment, and anger that may come with raising a child as well as explore the intertwining of these shameful feelings with pride and love. These figures are a new visioning, from the daughters’ perspective, of what it means to shape another human being.

Taking on such topics as aging, rebellion, loss, domestic violence, homelessness, and gender identity, the voices of Daughters aim to upend the reader’s conceptions of the characters and throw light upon what it means for a girl to come out from under her parents as a woman of her own making.

Cover design: Nathan Putens
ISBN: 978-1-950404-06-3
Paperback: $18
Publication date: September 1, 2021

Brittney Corrigan is the author of three previous books of poetry: Breaking (WordTech Editions), Navigation (The Habit of Rainy Nights Press), and 40 Weeks (Finishing Line Press). Corrigan was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection.

Praise for Daughters

“Brittney Corrigan is a sorceress of voices. Never have I read persona poems as deeply true and wholly convincing as the ones gathered in this stunning collection. In poem after poem, Corrigan shape-shifts—now the daughter of a magician’s assistant, a surgeon, a seismologist, the Medusa, the Yeti, and more—mining history, myth, fairy tales, and the professions to explore the conceit of daughterhood. By the time I got to the end of this gorgeous book, with all its richly imagined lives, I felt in the presence of a great daughterly chorus, one that tells us ‘the story of [our] own longing.’ Revelatory, authentic, and moving, Daughters tears off the masks, taking us to the heart of what it means to be female, human, and alive.”

—Alison Townsend, author of Persephone in America

“Before we are women, we are daughters, clothed in the superstitions of others and shaped by beliefs, talents, interests, and traumas that are not our own. Brittney Corrigan knows this. She knows how much the present depends upon the past and knows, too, that the truest work of growing up for a girl lies in sloughing off that which does not belong to you in pursuit of that which does. The poems in this stunning collection delve deeply into the highly empathetic gesture of persona, embodying the daughters of characters from history, the headlines, and mythology to trace how we are formed and how we, in turn, shed and gather into our own unique selves. With luminous language, arresting imagery, surprising form, and a marrow-deep knowledge of love and loss, the poet shines in this excavation of context and identity, this praise song for the stretching of limbs toward the light—and for the irrepressible essence of girls becoming. A beautiful, unforgettable work of artful love.”

—Stacey Lynn Brown, author of The Shallows and editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry

“Beyond the cleverness of these vividly specific, playfully imagined persona poems—which draw from the language of professions like taxidermy to time travel to the Minotaur—are Corrigan’s deft insights into human emotions, and the array of ways we understand ourselves and who we come from. ‘We sing / for the same reason cranes sing, / or the deepening whales, / or a whole fierce chorus of wolves,’ Siren’s Daughter says, correcting male hubris, in one of my favorites. Corrigan creates an original and brilliantly fierce chorus.”

—Alexandra Teague, author of The Wise and Foolish Builders

Excerpts from Daughters

Siren’s Daughter

Our songs are not for you.
My mother didn’t teach me
to lilt a lyric from my throat,
to crest a note from my
tongue, in order to enthrall
or summon a man. 

Such conceit, to think
a goddess would sing
of men’s deeds. We sing
for the same reason cranes sing,
or the deepening whales,
or a whole fierce chorus of wolves. 

I wish all of you would bind
your rough and yearning
bodies to the masts
of your figureheaded ships,
sails a-beat in the salty
wind, breaking the waves. 

Because truth be told,
I’ve had enough of your
maddening inability
to keep your hearts and hands
to yourselves. Your excuses
puddle ‘round your boots. 

But still you come. My mother
says men cannot leave a thing
of beauty to unfurl of its own
accord. You must always lean
in and pluck it, roots and all,
no matter the withering. 

So we have to make our homes
among the sharpest rocks.
We have to pick the roughest
whorl of seas. And if we draw
your ships to smithereens, well,
that will not keep us from singing.

Unknown Daughter
     for Baby Kamo (Mineral, Washington, 1920)

The mountain has watched over me
for a century. We understand each
other. The mountain misses its true name,
the one taken from it, and I did not live
long enough to be given a name, none at all.
I try to be grateful I was given a stone. 

My corner of the cemetery is quiet.
I am a secret door to the unmarkeds
and overgrowns behind me in the grove.
One tree leans and creaks, postponing
its fall. I think the tree is sad. If it falls
on me, perhaps no one will ever remember. 

Before, when my mother carried me inside her,
the mountain watched over the hollowing of its kin,
giving up only chalky arsenic, the roughest coal,
and never, never gold. Then the mountain
watched over the mills, the felling of many trees,
their bones rolling and knocking in the lake. 

My father worked the horses, hitched them
to carts of logs. The mountain watched over
my father, my mother. Watched the railroad arrive,
watched the steam trains take the logs away.
Watched when fire took the mill, and when
the war came, and when I was left behind. 

None of them ever came back. The mountain
misses our neighbors. Fugimoto. Okano. Sakita.
Yamaguchi. Sako. Josika. Oishi. Niwa.
Takizuwa. Saranda. Kojima. Mori. Doi.
What was there to come back to? Who was left
to come back at all? So the mountain watches over me. 

Berries bristle up and stain my stone. Moss
and ricegrass, creeping buttercup. I have the nicest view
when the sun sinks behind the trees. The town dwindles,
the old post office splinters its windows by the lake.
The fishermen come, the lake gives up its fish.
The mountain and I mourn the absence of our names.