My son ( a high school English teacher) and I share a love, maybe even an obsession, for genre fiction—horror, fantasy, science fiction. This love extends to movies as well as books, and not always the highest quality of movies. There’s a lot to appreciate in even the cheesiest of 70s and 80s slasher movies and all the tropes associated with them. Movies like Scream and Cabin In the Woods got a lot of mileage out of unkillable killers, horny teenagers, and of course, final girls.

Which brings us to this indie gem of a poetry book, I Am Not Your Final Girl. I recently turned 60, and my son gave me this slim, unassuming volume as a perfect birthday gift. Holland does something amazing here. She takes what in other hands could have been a whacky idea—write a series of poems celebrating the final girls (and some who didn’t make it) of movies from throughout history—and invests the poems with so much heart, pain, triumph, tragedy, inspiration, and most of all humanity, that I read through it twice in the same evening.

Each poem is dedicated to a specific final girl, from a specific movie. If you’re imaging that the poems are just retellings of the movies, think again. Holland uses the characters for jumping off points, for heartfelt meditations on sexuality, feminism, violence, sorrow and redemption. Some of the poems are triumphant, some overwhelmingly sad. Many of them are revelations. Holland demands new evaluations of even the slashiest of slasher movies.

Whether you’re a fan of slasher films or not, and you’ll probably get even more out of it if you are, get yourself a copy of I Am Not Your Final Girl. Do it for yourself. Do it for Laurie Strode.