Bad Daughter explores misbehavior--its risky pleasures and often tragic consequences--through poems about "bad" daughters, sisters, and their mothers. What happens to the sister who obeys? What if a daughter refuses her inheritance? Can she? What sanctuary and what limits do worship and domesticity provide? Gorham adopts several lyric forms--'morality tales,' ironic prayers, scaled-down sonnets, sharp meditations on concepts such as envy, detachment, and immortality--to show that the self as forged by generations of women and girls is both subversive and enduring.