Carolyn Zaikowski, Author
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A Child Is Being Killed: a novel

A teenage girl named Shrap is sold into sex slavery by her father in exchange for a corporation. A Child Is Being Killed is a story that is struggling to tell itself; it is a story about a girl whose body and mind are determined to become real through this broken telling. Shrap's words are a vessel that holds the question 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, and paints a complicated portrait of her mind and body, amidst a world of men who actively and violently attempt to erase her.

Read online excerpts at 1913: A Journal of Forms and apt. Review it at Goodreads and Amazon.

Purchase 

Aqueous Books/Prick of the Spindle Amazon ​


Product Details: 
Paperback: 164 pages
Publisher: Aqueous Books
Release date: June 30, 2013
ISBN-10: 0988383780
ISBN-13: 978-0988383784


​Praise and reviews

Toronto Quarterly
Rain Taxi
The Lit Pub
HTMLGiant

Skylight Press
Grab the Lapels


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, author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL 


From the title on, Carolyn Zaikowski develops [the] strategy of doubling/splitting that simultaneously asserts the presence of inescapably awful situations and the possibility of a tiny breathing space for beauty (and love and hopefulness) in the even bleakest of places. -HTML Giant

​“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, author of Cool For You,
The New Fuck You, Inferno: a poet’s novel, The Importance of Being Iceland, 
and others



A Child Is Being Killed both inhabits the terrifying space of its title while giving a singular, lyrical voice to its victim. -Rain Taxi


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, author of The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Incubation: a space for monsters, and Humanimal [a project for future children]









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  • Home
  • Bio
  • Books
    • In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse
    • A Child Is Being Killed: A Novel
  • Selected work
  • Classes & Events
  • Consulting
  • Contact
  • Support