About 20% of girls under the age of eighteen have experienced sexual abuse.1 In Everygirl, Angela Dribben describes the evolution from girl to woman of a particular girl-turned-woman, yet one that any girl/woman, and perhaps every girl/woman, may find reflected in her own life. Girls are exploited, abused, and raped by older boys and men, most often by someone known to them. If you are female, you know this. It’s happened to you or to someone you know. Dribben recounts an early experience of such abuse:

There are men
here who know young girls
are the easiest
to hoist by their cut offs and tank top and tan
onto the deep freezer on the screened back porch
while their wives shop for nuts.

This story with its exacting details is found in the first poem in Everygirl, aptly titled “Where I’m from.” A deft hand continues to describe intimate details—poem after poem—with exquisite precision. Dribben recounts being the “1 in 30” girl at a military academy, “where I learned to wound like a woman, / To catch the blood and hide it away.” In “Forgive those as we forgive,” is this roll call of men: “two battalion commanders, / three defensive backs, a postgraduate point guard, […] all before I was fifteen.” And more abuse is retold in “A Woman and her Smile,”

I went home with him and we went to sleep, and I left in the middle of the night
with no place to go […]

I went to work the next day without my legs.
My throat was missing.
My navel seeped sick with the knowing.

Of what was endured in youth, Dribben also chalks up infertility, asking “what boy took my uterus from me” and “how did it get so motherfuckin scarred that it can’t hold an egg.”

Most of the poems, well-crafted as they are, came at me like a conversation with a girlfriend telling all her worst tales, all the graphic details, interspersed with odd family fables from Dribben’s home in Virginia, such as a fourth-grade field trip to “Uncle John’s hog hotel,” with its “9.9mph sign” or “Momma’s unwillingness to operate / kitchen appliances.” And because of the conversational tone, we listen, shake our heads, commiserate, enjoy. These poems are not without humor, not without transformation, not without mercy. In a happy, but not at all sentimental, ending, we are shown a thriving partnership,

Now it is us and we draw plans for a porch of glass
on a cabin above a spring between two tobacco barns
and a homemade smoker just above the spring.

In time, it seems that Dribben forgives herself, and shows compassion for boys and men who were raised to smell “like labor,” walk “like a king,” were pampered by their mothers, and were allowed to “think they are so smart.” In “For the boys,” she asks,

What is there to do
except forgive the young boy
only a name tag
bearing any semblance to home.

It is home to which Dribben returns time after time in Everygirl, recalling her wounds, but able to recognize that what is beautiful exists for her, too.