No Map Could Show Them

"This is an amazing collection. It’s radical, what she is doing. And it’s great to include poetry in this list. To create this book, she did a lot of research into archives, looked up some of the female pioneers and brought out a lot of untold histories of the women who were involved in early alpinism and mountaineering, sharing some of these stories that have been overlooked or deliberately hidden. In one of her poems, she reflects on this brilliant comment from a journalist, who wrote—tongue-in-cheek—that now the Grépon had disappeared because two women had climbed it without a man. How could any self-respecting man climb this route anymore? It’s a clever, fun take on that history, and why we have a man’s history of the mountains. She also brings a lot of herself into it—you can feel your way in, be among the emotions of that all, which is cool. It’s opening up, and recently has been very consciously opening up. Even in the space of time that I’ve been climbing—ten, fifteen years—the transformation I’ve seen has been crazy. A huge, huge change. But there’s a long way to go. A lot of the culture we’ve inherited has been masculine, and the literature is male-led. So there’s more to explore and to understand. But it’s been cool to see the change happening live in front of us."