There Will Be No More Daughters

Christine Larussoholds a B.A. from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Literary Review, Pleiades, Women's Studies Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prelude, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She is the 2017 winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize, and has been named a finalist for both the Orlando Poetry Prize and the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her poem 'Lunar Understanding' was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a producer for Rachel Zucker's podcast Commonplace. She is from Los Angeles, and currently lives there with her partner, critic and editor Colin Beckett and their dog, who does not have a job. She moved home to California after spending a decade in Brooklyn.

This first spell, the first marvel, of this collection is its primary word: No. A word as solid and sure as it is adolescent and reckless; a word of valiant resistance and of desolation. There is sorrow. There is shit-kicking. There is domesticity and there is a void. There is intimacy. There is ache. Few books, few poets, can handle all of this with as much care, perception, power and inquisition as Christine Larusso. She is a genius at gracefully walking this inner tightrope, then striking a match to it. There Will Be No More Daughters reminded me of how pliable and immense and satisfying poetry can be." - Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro"Larusso takes the liminal world of her complex identity and turns it into a wild Southern California dreamscape where 'the histories won't stop calling from the grave' and where she enacts how these histories shape her and her family's inheritances. She takes great formal risks and lands them. I adore the ecstatic vision of this book, the nimble voice, and the book's baroque sensuality. Like Shane McCrae, Christine Larusso inscribes the inbetweenness with heart, intelligence, and guts." - Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Cruel Futures"Christine Larusso's exquisite, fearless, and searching poems have changed the way I see, how I make sense of the mystery and power of girlhood, of home, of adolescence, of shame. 'I was a locked box with a clock inside,' Larusso writes, and an understanding that has long eluded me comes crisply into focus. Every word of There Will Be No More Daughters is ignited with the ferocity of Larusso's mind. I am so deeply grateful for this book, and for this writer - I will never forget the truths I've found here." - Julie Buntin, author of Marlena