Lauren Groff and the Radical Act of Paying Attention

She doesn’t have a name when we meet her, though she’s been given many over the years: Lamentations, assigned to her as a foundling, a name of profound grief and mourning if also poetry; Zed, formerly the name of her mistress’s pet monkey, “the least and the littlest and the last to be counted like the strangest of all the letters of the alphabet”; “murderess,” perhaps a fair description of her legal status, if not her spiritual one. But “Girl” is what she calls herself, as she urges her starving body and exhausted legs and indefatigable spirit deeper into the wilderness.