Girl Zoo

Aimee Parkison is the author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman: Stories, winner of Fiction Collective Two's Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, The Petals of Your Eyes, and the story collections The Innocent Party and Woman with Dark Horses, winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. Parkison is the director of creative writing at Oklahoma State University, where she teaches fiction writing in the MFA and PhD programs.  Carol Guess is the author of nineteen books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, Tinderbox Lawn, and With Animal (cowritten with Kelly Magee). In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. She teaches in the MFA program at Western Washington University and lives in Seattle.

Part dark angry fairytales, part avant-gothic myths, part surreal fever dreams, and always genuinely unique, Girl Zoo is a remarkable collaborative collection of concentrated narraticules about 56 captive women who are the same woman, not the same woman, and not not the same woman. Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess explore the thematics of the commodified and controlled female subject, complicating the problem, nuancing it, metaphorizing it so the reader sees it always anew, yet never offering any easy way out. The rhythms, syntax, vocabulary, and meta-logic feel childlike, yet the content remains relentlessly bloody, violent, somehow naively (and, of course, not naively at all) dangerous to the bone."" - Lance Olsen, author of Dreamlives of Debris""Girl Zoo is a breathtaking journey inside the cold hard facts of gender and sexual incarceration. Taking the "woman as object" trope to its logical extreme, these stories stage a break-in and dare the reader to imagine what it would take for women and girls to break out of the very narratives that keep us caged. A triumph of the imaginal in the face of a culture that would see us silenced, dead, and gone. Read these girls, change your life."" - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan