Girlfriends is a celebration of women's friendships in poetic prose, including mentors, characters and authors whose writing was important to her. One by one, the story emerges of a working-class women who loses her mother as an adolescent and becomes a mother heself, as well as a poet, a novelist and a professor. In Henning's friendship world--the bohemian communities of Detroit and New York City--one meets artists, poets, fiction writers, literary critics, activists, mothers, yoga practitioners and teachers, among many others.

Barbara Henning is a poet, novelist, editor and a writer of poetic prose with four novels and eight collections of poetry. Her most recent book, Ferne, a Detroit Story, received a Notable Book Award from the Libraray of Michigan. Born in Detroit, she has lived in New York City since 1984, with interim years in Tucson, Arizona and Mysore, India.

"There's a secret spiral at this book's throbbing center: the mother-wound as a defining moment as well as a biographical footnote in a much larger life. Oscillating between the very tender and the very cool, Henning pays homage to the constellation of women who have touched her life. She writes, 'I was lucky to be a writer and reader' and after reading Girlfriend, I feel lucky, too." — Lisa Rogal, la belle indifference

"Often the lives of ordinary and extraordinary women are unseen and vanish from history. In this moving, beautiful book, Barbara Henning captures the delicate web of female friendships: intense, sometimes fragile, frequently sculpted by time and circumstance." — Maggie Dubris, author of BrokeDown Palace