Rosie Garland's dauntless and enthralling new poetry collection, What Girls Do in the Dark, invites us to leap into deep space - across a universe where light, names, place and time become the "distance between things that stand like sisters". We venture through strange night-time transformations, between northerly points and places of being and not-being. In a twilight alive with glimmering energy, we discover not just outer-space, but inner space - where the body and the self are made of infinite galaxies, illuminated for the briefest blink of a life.
Garland's poetry is rooted in the realm of gothic imagination, mythology and the uncanny. It contains magnitudes and magic, feminist fables starstruck with science and astronomy. Like comets, these dazzling poems explore containment, liberation, near-misses, extinction, and ultimately, they ask what it means to escape the pull of gravity and blaze your own bright, all-consuming and astonishing path.
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We're touched by your desire to join our great work, of dismembering the fabric of time and matter. LETTER OF REJECTION FROM A BLACK HOLE
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(@NineArchesPress, 17 November 2020, ebook, 79 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I've enjoyed the author's novels but had no idea she wrote poetry. I wanted to read this collection when I saw it promoted on Twitter. I loved the title and the cover and it sounded really enjoyable. I enjoyed every poem in this collection. I loved the gothic, mythology and fantasy overtones. The style of the poems is a bit different than the stuff I usually read and all the more enjoyable because of this.
