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Girl Work
WINNER OF THE 2022 NOEMI PRESS BOOK AWARD IN POETRY
GIRL WORK, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, GIRL WORK challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout GIRL WORK, a self is restored from the detritus of memory—flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.
GIRL WORK, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, GIRL WORK challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout GIRL WORK, a self is restored from the detritus of memory—flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.
94 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2024
1 person is currently reading
111 people want to read
About the author
Zefyr Lisowski
5 books54 followersZefyr Lisowski is the author of Uncanny Valley Girls, an essay collection about horror movies, exes, and intimacy (Harper Perennial 2025). A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Nonfiction and 2023 Queer|Art Fellow, she’s also the author of two poetry collections, Girl Work (Noemi Press 2024) and Blood Box (Black Lawrence 2019). Raised in the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina, Zefyr lives in Brooklyn and has seen grave robbers twice.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 9, 2025
Very very very very good. I think the author and I may be bipolar besties? 💗👯♀️
March 24, 2025
Read earlier this year and forgot to log — full review on ANMLY!
https://medium.com/anomalyblog/poetic...
https://medium.com/anomalyblog/poetic...
June 13, 2024
This collection is brutal. 100% worth your time, just be warned. Will simultaneously make you so intensely sad and riotously angry.
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I think, I HOPE, the poem “Are you there still? Oh. I do, I do, I do” represents a future, a moment beyond all the rest. But I’m not 100% sure.
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Another stunner from my @the_rumpus poetry subscription, which remains in the top 10 list of things I’ve ever done for myself.
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I think, I HOPE, the poem “Are you there still? Oh. I do, I do, I do” represents a future, a moment beyond all the rest. But I’m not 100% sure.
.
Another stunner from my @the_rumpus poetry subscription, which remains in the top 10 list of things I’ve ever done for myself.
April 9, 2024
I started underlining but quickly realized I would've underlined nearly the entire book if I continued. This collection is everything. I am so impressed by Lisowski's visual poetics; overlapping prose blocks perfectly capture the experience of living inside a mind crowded by intrusive memories of trauma. She writes eloquently about how traumatized existence complicates memory and recall. She experiments with form and hybridity. She references pop culture touchstones from Verbinski's The Ring to Kesha's "TiK ToK." She does it all in a tight eighty-two pages, thematically cohesive yet sonically diverse. An absolute home run. I am grateful to Noemi Press for the review copy.
February 26, 2025
Full Rating: 4.5 stars rounded up
To read Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski is to step into a landscape of jagged edges and unraveling seams, where the boundaries between self and survival blur. This collection is a meditation on the violences that shape gender—how femininity is sculpted by expectation, how desire is tangled with harm, how to live inside a body constantly made into an object. Lisowski writes with a lyricism that is both splintered and searing, each line cut with a precision that makes the fragmentation itself feel intentional, necessary. This is poetry that refuses neat resolutions, demanding instead that we sit with its hauntings, its echoes, its wreckage.
At the heart of Girl Work is an interrogation of labor—the labor of girlhood, of desirability, of making oneself into something men want, even (especially) when it erases the self in the process. The collection pulses with the understanding that to be seen as beautiful is often to be consumed. “To be beautiful: to survive,” Lisowski writes, but survival here is not safety; it is a negotiation, a question without an answer. The poems reckon with sexual violence and men’s presumed access to feminized bodies, tracing the ways in which harm becomes inheritance, how girlhood is a performance of fear learned early and worn forever.
Lisowski invokes The Ring, the 2002 horror film, as a recurring motif—Samara Morgan, abandoned at the bottom of a well, becomes a spectral mirror for the speaker. The fear isn’t just of becoming her, but of realizing that all girls might already be her, trapped in cycles of harm they never consented to. The horror here is not cinematic but structural, embedded in the fabric of gender itself.
Among the standout pieces, “Crazy4Crazy, or Pharmacological Solutions for Personal Problems” lingers long after reading. A meditation on T4T love, psychiatric institutionalization, and the limits of care under capitalism, the poem underscores one of the collection’s central tensions: what does it mean to care for others when access to care is itself a privilege? Girl Work does not offer easy answers, but it does offer a space to sit with the complexity.
This is a book that resists closure, one that leaves you a little raw, a little undone. Lisowski’s voice is urgent, interrogative, and unflinching—each poem reaching outward, demanding to be heard, to be reckoned with.
📖 Read this if you love: haunting, fragmented poetry that interrogates gender, labor, and survival; pro-survivor narratives that resist easy redemption; and works by Andrea Long Chu and Franny Choi.
🔑 Key Themes: Gendered Violence and Survival, The Commodification of the Body, Haunting and Memory, Beauty as a Construct, Solidarity and Care Under Capitalism.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Sexual Harassment (minor), Pedophilia (minor), Drug Use (minor), Pandemic (minor), Forced Institutionalization (minor), Suicide (minor), Police Brutality (minor), Alcoholism (minor), Death of Parent (minor), Sexual Assault (moderate), Sexual Content (moderate).
To read Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski is to step into a landscape of jagged edges and unraveling seams, where the boundaries between self and survival blur. This collection is a meditation on the violences that shape gender—how femininity is sculpted by expectation, how desire is tangled with harm, how to live inside a body constantly made into an object. Lisowski writes with a lyricism that is both splintered and searing, each line cut with a precision that makes the fragmentation itself feel intentional, necessary. This is poetry that refuses neat resolutions, demanding instead that we sit with its hauntings, its echoes, its wreckage.
At the heart of Girl Work is an interrogation of labor—the labor of girlhood, of desirability, of making oneself into something men want, even (especially) when it erases the self in the process. The collection pulses with the understanding that to be seen as beautiful is often to be consumed. “To be beautiful: to survive,” Lisowski writes, but survival here is not safety; it is a negotiation, a question without an answer. The poems reckon with sexual violence and men’s presumed access to feminized bodies, tracing the ways in which harm becomes inheritance, how girlhood is a performance of fear learned early and worn forever.
Lisowski invokes The Ring, the 2002 horror film, as a recurring motif—Samara Morgan, abandoned at the bottom of a well, becomes a spectral mirror for the speaker. The fear isn’t just of becoming her, but of realizing that all girls might already be her, trapped in cycles of harm they never consented to. The horror here is not cinematic but structural, embedded in the fabric of gender itself.
Among the standout pieces, “Crazy4Crazy, or Pharmacological Solutions for Personal Problems” lingers long after reading. A meditation on T4T love, psychiatric institutionalization, and the limits of care under capitalism, the poem underscores one of the collection’s central tensions: what does it mean to care for others when access to care is itself a privilege? Girl Work does not offer easy answers, but it does offer a space to sit with the complexity.
This is a book that resists closure, one that leaves you a little raw, a little undone. Lisowski’s voice is urgent, interrogative, and unflinching—each poem reaching outward, demanding to be heard, to be reckoned with.
📖 Read this if you love: haunting, fragmented poetry that interrogates gender, labor, and survival; pro-survivor narratives that resist easy redemption; and works by Andrea Long Chu and Franny Choi.
🔑 Key Themes: Gendered Violence and Survival, The Commodification of the Body, Haunting and Memory, Beauty as a Construct, Solidarity and Care Under Capitalism.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Sexual Harassment (minor), Pedophilia (minor), Drug Use (minor), Pandemic (minor), Forced Institutionalization (minor), Suicide (minor), Police Brutality (minor), Alcoholism (minor), Death of Parent (minor), Sexual Assault (moderate), Sexual Content (moderate).
March 26, 2026
Es fällt mir grundsätzlich schwer, Gedichtbände zu beurteilen, aber dieses hier macht es mir gleich noch etwas schwerer. Es ist eines jener Bücher, die ich erst wirken lassen musste.
Die Gedichte sind extrem eindrücklich, teilweise konnte ich es körperlich fühlen. Lisowski hält nichts zurück und wenn wir damit nicht klar kommen - tja, nicht ihr Problem. Es hat auch kein Mensch Rücksicht auf sie genommen, wieso sollte sie dies in ihren Texten machen?
Diese Gedichte sind einzigartig, aber ihre Themen sind es nicht. Deshalb müssen wir darüber sprechen, über sexuelle Gewalt, Missbrauch und Queerfeindlichkeit. Wir müssen laut sein und dürfen nicht davor zurückschrecken, uns selbst unwohl zu fühlen. Manchmal müssen wir das aushalten. Aushalten können.
Die Gedichte sind extrem eindrücklich, teilweise konnte ich es körperlich fühlen. Lisowski hält nichts zurück und wenn wir damit nicht klar kommen - tja, nicht ihr Problem. Es hat auch kein Mensch Rücksicht auf sie genommen, wieso sollte sie dies in ihren Texten machen?
Diese Gedichte sind einzigartig, aber ihre Themen sind es nicht. Deshalb müssen wir darüber sprechen, über sexuelle Gewalt, Missbrauch und Queerfeindlichkeit. Wir müssen laut sein und dürfen nicht davor zurückschrecken, uns selbst unwohl zu fühlen. Manchmal müssen wir das aushalten. Aushalten können.
November 15, 2024
intense, heart-wrenching… but also so very good. poems on “the myriads coercions of intimacy, work, and form” as one review put it which i like and is true
“i'm standing in my bathrobe, reading the comments / section one more time. / i'm washing the filth off my face. / i'm holding on with a meanness / so abundant it could be taken / for grace. poem, i don't know / what i think, but have i ever?“
“i'm standing in my bathrobe, reading the comments / section one more time. / i'm washing the filth off my face. / i'm holding on with a meanness / so abundant it could be taken / for grace. poem, i don't know / what i think, but have i ever?“
March 17, 2024
So many things I love about Zef's work
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews