They Call It a Body: Gender, Performance, and Other Lies They Tell Little Girls (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798289239587)

"I was built for performance, not presence."
- from PALIL THIA

THEY CALLED IT A BODY is the debut chapbook from Lethien-a collection of poems that fracture the myth of progress and hold the wreckage of girlhood up to the light.

These are poems of performance and survival, where identity is borrowed, erased, or reshaped until it fits. With sharp lyricism and brutal clarity, Lethien explores the rituals of being seen: gender as spectacle, masking as safety, and healing as yet another demand for softness.

Rooted in dissociation, memory, and the silence that follows survival, this is a body rendered in fragments-and every fragment speaks.