Winner of the 2015 Little A Poetry Contest.

A journey through girlhood, self-discovery, and the little acts of violence we inflict on one another.

In an astounding debut poetry collection, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Lambda Literary fellow Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa presents a relentless but refined portrait of one young woman’s journey toward self-discovery. Her poems explore the eternal themes of the human condition—nature, origin, shame, identity, desire, mortality—with sensitivity and specificity. They illuminate and interrogate the ways that her characters inflict and experience pain, ultimately revealing how we must all face our shame in order to grow. No voice is blameless; no person is exempt. Divided into four sections, the collection reads as a life cycle of emotional metamorphosis: girlhood and sexuality, trauma, relationships, and grief. Rummage is a wildly courageous and lyrical book full of music, metaphor, and the power of memory.