Bøker av Nadia de Vries

Thistle is a young woman whose father, a pilot, dies suddenly in a plane crash when she is thirteen years old. The airline's compensation payout is substantial but doesn't assuage the family's grief. By the time she is seventeen, Thistle has lost most of her teenage years trying to make sense of her father's premature death. In the meantime, her body is developing, and she finds herself sexualized and objectified by men against her will. Teenaged Thistle is increasingly aware of her allure but unsure of how to use that to her advantage. When her mother gifts her a camera, Thistle decides to turn the lens on herself, capturing her nude body in various poses just before she turns eighteen.

Know Thy Audience, Nadia de Vries's third poetry collection, disavows the platitude from which it takes its name and makes the reader complicit in both her aggression and her submission, sparked by a history of domestic abuse that escapes all euphemism and metaphor - but not poetry altogether