The Paper Girl

The Paper Girl is a poetry chapbook that details the coming of age story of a daughter growing up in a Baptist fundamentalist home in New Jersey. The girl is a working class paper girl who is sometimes invited into the private world of her privileged neighbor's lives where she tries to make sense of what family means. She is good at observing, processing, and reflecting upon the loneliness, kindness, and freedom of others around her. But to her own horror, she also internalizes their impressions about the port wine stain birthmark on her face, and dizzy from the orthodoxy of her mother's rules and religion, she struggles to find a language to narrate her own story.