Claws

CLAWS is Victoria Strong's debut poetry collection, drawn from diary entries written in the dark corridor between girlhood and womanhood. Gothic in tone and steeped in the atmosphere of fairy tale, folklore, religion, and romance, the collection traces the loves, losses, hungers, and transformations that accompany a young woman into adulthood.

Moving between confession, love poem, prayer, fable, and dark humor, CLAWS is preoccupied with devotion in all its forms: to lovers, to God, to beauty, to memory, to art, and eventually, to the self. Its speaker loves voraciously and sometimes disastrously. She falls in love, loses faith, confronts sexual violence, leaves a marriage, explores her sexuality, mourns old versions of herself, and discovers again and again how difficult it is to loosen her grip on the things she has loved.

Throughout the collection, the ordinary and the archetypal bleed into one another. Lovers become saints, ghosts, suns, wolves, and gods. Religious devotion slips easily into erotic devotion; heartbreak becomes haunting; girlhood lingers like a place the speaker can visit but cannot return to. The poems borrow freely from fairy tale, scripture, folklore, and the Gothic, giving enormous shapes to experiences that are at once intensely personal and deeply familiar.

At its heart, CLAWS is a coming-of-age collection about attachment: the beautiful and sometimes brutal ways we hold on to lovers, beliefs, identities, dreams, and former selves-and who we become when we finally loosen our grip. Its poems move through queer sexuality, faith transitions, girlhood and womanhood, divorce, desire, trauma, friendship, self-love, and the strange persistence of hope after heartbreak.

For young women standing somewhere between who they were taught to be and who they are becoming, CLAWS offers no clean transformation. Growing up is messy, erotic, frightening, funny, sacred, and unfinished. Some things are released gently. Others leave claw marks.