“It’s those memories, those things you don’t expect to miss, which Wolf shares with us in her inimitable style that make this collection so rich.”
-François Bereaud, from the 2023 review at Bending Genres
“My birthplace was misplaced”, Shannon Wolf writes, and in Green Card Girl, her poems follow her journey from the South-West of England to Washington, Louisiana, and Colorado. Forming a tight, cohesive narrative, moving from a place of loneliness and confusion to a place of belonging, Wolf’s poems reckon with the estrangement of first, one and then, another parent with tender attention and brutal lines, and celebrate a new, startling love and chosen family, with insistent sonnets and electrifying use of white space. Green Card Girl is evocative, emotional, and epiphanic; Wolf writes: “I am not going home. I have made it here, anew.”
“There are odes in this marvelous collection – to chicken wings, to Tony Soprano, to the poet’s husband’s Toyota – but really, every poem here is an ode. Shannon Wolf writes hymns of praise to all things, for they’ve all helped form a voice that is sensitive, observant, and, more than anything, grateful. Green Card Girl salutes past and present lives, yes, but it also tips its beret to the lives that are to come.”
– David Kirby, author of The House on Boulevard St.
“Shannon Wolf’s debut collection is incandescent, a transnational anthem about family trauma and the universal desire for selfhood. Through requiem and elegy and humor, Wolf’s poems navigate the complicated geographies of the inherited self and explore, with grace and devastating wit, the challenging process of unbecoming, of being found, of finding love when all seems lost. Beyond the ‘land of no mothers’ and the hollowing fatherlessness that haunts these poems, Green Card Girl also reminds us that there is forgiveness in becoming. Arguing that the body—however ravaged, however abused—is a fundamentally sacred place, Wolf crafts a powerful warning in these pages: Do not allow others to poison your precious real estate; forge your own peace. You deserve it. Guaranteed to make you laugh and cry, Wolf is refreshing and raw and obliterates expectations of what a poem is and can do.”
– Tara Stillions Whitehead, author of They More Than Burned
“A classic American story of dreams and immigration. But more than that, Green Card Girl is a chronicle of pain, disappointment, and the baggage ‘so moveable & immovable,’ that we carry. Ultimately, Wolf’s story is about survival and love, and anyone who has ever yearned for home will find a fellow traveler in Wolf.”
– Eric Nguyen, author of Things We Lost to the Water
“Shannon Wolf invites the reader into a past so fiercely nostalgic for its future. Daring, ferocious, and tender, Green Card Girl grapples with hope and disappointment, leaving behind Glasgow pubs and Domino’s delivery drivers to forge a distinct new world of belonging. Don’t sleep on this stunning debut.”
– Gauraa Shekhar, author of Notes
“Shannon Wolf’s Green Card Girl is a searching, searing collection of dreams and desires. At every turn, these poems are “trying to find a way to get home,” to a place of belonging. Through clever craft and sheer force of will, the poems in Green Card Girl deliver a multi-part harmony of placemaking, love, and longing for what might be out there, “waiting for me.” This is a debut that moves with fierce courage and sonorous language.”
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