Who’s Going to Love the Dying Girl?

By Bree Rolfe

"Who’s Going to Love the Dying Girl?" vibrates with anger, confusion, honesty, and anguish as an adult suffering from Cystic Fibrosis navigates love and loss in her failing body. With a voice unwavering in its honesty, a reckless past and a foreshortened future collide in these poems. The conversational narratives grapple with relationships, loss, and chronic illness woven together with threads of music and pop culture references that make them relatable. Their vulnerability is tinged with a dry and introspective wit that cuts to the bone of the speaker’s darkest fears. These poems confront the title question thrown at her one terrible night: who will love the dying girl?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005908812

Book preview

WHO’S GOING TO LOVE THE DYING GIRL

Copyright © 2021 Bree Rolfe

All Rights Reserved.

Published by Unsolicited Press.

First Edition.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. People, places, and notions in these stories are from the author’s imagination; any resemblance is purely coincidental.

Portions of this work first appeared, in slightly different form, in Zyzzyva (Spring 2007) and Flock (April 2017).

Attention schools and businesses: for discounted copies on large orders, please contact the publisher directly. Retailers and libraries can order copies through Ingram

Unsolicited Press

Portland, Oregon

www.unsolicitedpress.com

[e-mail]

619-354-8005

Cover Design: Kathryn Gerhardt

Editor: Samuel Nichols; Bekah Stogner

Print ISBN: 978-1-950730-77-3

For Bonnie Staiger who first gifted me this life filled with words

A litany of bad decisions

Part One: Omens

The only remaining

correspondence between

the two of us— a New York

Times article about Marfa

and a reply of yippee.

Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner

of Heaven on audiobook—

Mormonism, blood

atonement, a six hour

drive through desert.

The first gallery with photographs

of Katrina’s destruction paired

with poems by children left

in her wake. Something beautiful

repurposed from storm

but still destruction.