Safia Elhillo Takes a Leap in New Poems, Writes About Shame and the Body

'Poet Safia Elhillo never used to write about her body. She felt safer writing poems that pointed the reader's gaze away from herself. "Up until this point, I only knew how to write a neat, tidy and well-behaved book of poems," the 31-year-old poet says."The idea was that if it was not something I was going to talk about, I wasn't going to write a poem about it." But in her latest book of poems Elhillo takes that leap. It's called Girls That Never Die, in which she writes about the shame and violence that often comes with being a woman.'