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A Child Is Being Killed

A teenage girl named Shrap is sold into sex slavery by her father in exchange for a business. What follows is a story that is determined to tell itself, and a girl whose body and mind are struggling to become real through this broken telling. A Child Is Being Killed is a vessel that holds the problem posed by philosopher Maurice Blanchot: What does it mean to utter, “A child is being killed”? What is the nature and shape of this kind of non-presence? Is it even possible to speak of? At once dissociated and lucid, Shrap’s story stubbornly creates an existence out of Shrap, drawing a complicated portrait of her mind and body amidst a world of men who actively erase her.

“In her devastating and courageous new novel, A Child Is Being Killed, Carolyn Zaikowski renders bodies in extreme states of distress, but also falling [ruptured] into a radical newness. Language, in this complex work, has the capacity to both ‘constantly redistribute itself’ — and at the same time, to be a cry — to the reader, to the child, to the mother, to the beloved always (profoundly) out of reach: to: ‘Come here/Come here/Come here/Come here.’ Political and poetic, this is a work of prose that’s both ‘undone’ and ‘unspeakable.’ In this sense, the novel comes to us through gestures of narrative and sound that, at times, intersect — making a third space. ‘The opposite of space is love,’ writes Zaikowski, reminding us that: ‘It is okay to not understand. It is okay to look.’ And so, reading her words, we look. Because this is a writer who does not look away.” — Bhanu Kapil

“‘She hears her mother’s voice, but it is caught between two echos and a jail.’ Wow. No blurb I would write could capture the expansive pulpy difficulty of this saint of a little book. Disassociated, far-flung, atomized... how do you dub the streaming pileup of someone lost, unborn, already dead. Porny anime? A hot mess? Female? Carolyn Zaikowski’s A Child Is Being Killed, this tiny novel, is a messenger not of ‘truth’ but beautiful wrath.” — Eileen Myles

“Carolyn Zaikowski’s compassion, intelligence, and necessary anger positively radiate up from the pages of this book. The world is a better place for having her and her fierce, fragmented, tender writing in it.” — Danielle Dutton

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 161
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780988383784
  • Release date
  • 2013