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Girl Soldier: & Other Poems
Girl Soldier
by Liza Libes
Liza Libes of Pens and Poison is back with her latest haunting poetry collection—and you don’t want to miss it. Oscillating between personal confessionals in the style of Sylvia Plath and cultural critiques à la Matthew Arnold, Girl Soldier tackles memory, art, and desire, satisfying readers of contemporary poetry who crave honesty sharpened by wit and beauty.
From lyrical meditations on childhood and family to sharp dissections of modern art and womanhood, Girl Soldier features both tenderness and fire as Libes departs from her earlier, more juvenile works and finds her voice as a mature poet.
At once deeply personal and strikingly universal, Girl Soldier asks what it means to carry both beauty and brutality inside the self while never losing sight of the human soul.
by Liza Libes
Liza Libes of Pens and Poison is back with her latest haunting poetry collection—and you don’t want to miss it. Oscillating between personal confessionals in the style of Sylvia Plath and cultural critiques à la Matthew Arnold, Girl Soldier tackles memory, art, and desire, satisfying readers of contemporary poetry who crave honesty sharpened by wit and beauty.
From lyrical meditations on childhood and family to sharp dissections of modern art and womanhood, Girl Soldier features both tenderness and fire as Libes departs from her earlier, more juvenile works and finds her voice as a mature poet.
At once deeply personal and strikingly universal, Girl Soldier asks what it means to carry both beauty and brutality inside the self while never losing sight of the human soul.
- GenresPoetry
66 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 15, 2025
About the author
Liza Libes
5 books117 followersLiza received her B.A. and M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she studied the poetry of Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot. After being disillusioned by the ideological capture of literary study in the American academy, Liza founded Pens and Poison, a unique multi-platform project that aims to restore the idea of literature as a work of art rather than as a political vehicle. Through videos, articles, and podcast episodes, Pens and Poison engages Liza’s 50K+ Instagram followers and 20K+ YouTube subscribers on a daily basis. Her weekly Substack essays on literature, culture, and the humanities have established her as an authoritative literary and cultural critic in heterodox circles.
Liza’s writing has most recently appeared in The Boston Globe, Persuasion, The Hechinger Report, The New York Times Upfront, and the Jewish Book Council’s Paper Brigade. Liza is also the founder and CEO of Invictus Prep, an inventive college consulting startup that highlights her aptitude for writing and entrepreneurship. When she is not writing, you can find her at her favorite bookstore or opera house, invariably overdressed.
Liza’s writing has most recently appeared in The Boston Globe, Persuasion, The Hechinger Report, The New York Times Upfront, and the Jewish Book Council’s Paper Brigade. Liza is also the founder and CEO of Invictus Prep, an inventive college consulting startup that highlights her aptitude for writing and entrepreneurship. When she is not writing, you can find her at her favorite bookstore or opera house, invariably overdressed.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 25, 2025
4.5 stars as I am not a poetry person, but there are some great poems in here so I rounded up!
I especially liked Yellow, Peace, Falling, Loose Change, The Crematorium of Art, and Astronaut.
I would recommend this to anyone looking to get back into poetry!!
I especially liked Yellow, Peace, Falling, Loose Change, The Crematorium of Art, and Astronaut.
I would recommend this to anyone looking to get back into poetry!!
November 24, 2025
"Might I be too selfish, fatalistic?
Dare I reenact the Edens of my youth?"
Dare I reenact the Edens of my youth?"
May 18, 2026
3 stars wtv ig
February 12, 2026
This is the first book I have read by an author I became acquainted with on Substack. I enjoy her frequent posts with their penetrating and witting commentary on literature and the life of an aspiring author, and occasionally on politics. I've begun to look forward to her creative insights. I decided to try this, her latest volume of poetry, and found it very rewarding.
My strongest impressions from this volume are from her plaintive poems of lament. She writes in a confessional style like Sylvia Plath, whose poetry she studied, a style intimate, once taboo subjects. I remember writing a paper about Sylvia Path's poem "Daddy" in High School eons ago, a very intense poem about her relationship with her father and other abusive men, it is implied. Mrs. Libes is a graduate of the once great Columbia University, where Lionel Trilling used to teach, among a few other bright intellectual lights.
In the opening poem "Yellow" she describes her Jewish family's gathering on the evening of Pesach, or Passover. Amidst their celebration of the ancient religious tradition, they receive the news on the TV that Jews were not being let on campus. The eruptions of anti-Semitism on Columbia University campus and all over the United States, and abroad, were truly disturbing and the claims that it was just about Israeli policy and not about Jew hatred rang hollow. Indeed, there is an ancient Jew-hatred writ deep in Islam in many lines enjoining hatred and war against Jews and Christians in the Quran, Hadith, Sunna and Sharia, and forbidding friendship with them. Here is a moving record of a personal response of a soul to this new contrivance of sanctimonious hate.
Libes has the mysterious power of articulation that gathers somewhat beyond one's ken and whelms in its power and effect on the reader.
In "Princess Shulamith" she asks, it seems to me, about what the feminist empowerment of women might mean in the waning days of the United States' power. Then she brings it home yet more personally, asking what might capture her best in a windowpane, her relative wealth, or
"Is it a modest table stacked with books
That bear the imprints of my breathing?
Or is It yet a third, where,
Wedged between doctor and a husband
I am carrying the infant
Who shall pen the saga of my afterlife?"
She suggests that feminists have fomented, in destabilization of the West, their own demise. A feminism that can no longer define what a woman is very confused indeed.
She has a strong imaginative apprehension that enables her to convey through it a weighty sense of sacrilege or disenchantment that she rightly sees as a kind breaking of faith and fall of love. In "Horoscope," one of her lament poems, she plaintively evokes the death of love's hope in the face of betrayal…
"Remembering your yellow steed
Stamping out my fantasies
With scraggly hooves
As you were pleading on your knees
Burning up my magic books
As I adapt to trivialities
And trudge back home- "
"…I always thought that you were good
But I knew you wouldn't fight for me.
And I have wasted up my years
Bleaching out propriety
When I was just a toy to you
Fading in an afternoon."
I certainly feel a similar pain of loss and the feeling of having wasted years on vain love.
In "The Crematorium of Art" she valiantly and intelligently attacks the Progressive trashing of Truth and Beauty and their consequent devolution in apprehension.
"..Yet who am I to be so strict a judge of feeling?
I occupy myself with reason:
My work the brainchild of a dreamer
Expressive, complex, and at times, perhaps,
A bit jejeune- yet not enough to make a perfidy of liberty and right…"
"…Enough of setting altars to diversity
And burning white men at the stake."
Amen, sister. In this poem she also lamented a fixation on the physical looks of a poet. I listened with interest Dana Gioia's latest Youtube documentary, this on the poet Weldon Kees, and it is noteworthy he wed his nihilism with an impeccable sense of dress, but in the end was overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of it all. Gioia said he was the best dressed poet of the twentieth century.
"Stars" is another powerful lament poem:
"…I am peering at a gilded mirror in the bathroom
Like a Snow White's Evil Queen of pride
Hiding in that corner
Where you spoke your cruel bathetic purposeless
"Goodbye"
My makeup's smudged;
Purple bags besmirch my eyes
And I know you won't come back…"
She has a intelligent, ironic sense of humor and a valuable understanding of imaginative apprehension.
The lament continues,
"Tomorrow we will amble in each other's circles
Trapped within the same old horrid universe
Where music rings out for two people
But only one can hear the melody."
Who doesn't feel a little nihilistic at moments when dealing with unrequited or betrayed love?
The last poem in the volume is also one of these powerful laments. Her lament poems turn her personal sorrows and the struggles of her journey into fine works of art capturing perennial human suffering and permitting a degree of , a vein mined in their own way by the singer Patsy Cline, for instance, or by the contemporary singer Laufey, in their many lament songs. But I don't mean to peg Libes in this vein. She seems to have versatile powers.
I am reading through Louise Gluck's Poems 1962-2012 slowly, and was reminded a number of times of her powerful laments in her early collections, which seem to be about betrayed love, and also about the abortion she had as a result of the relationship. ("I killed for you…") Here is a short poem by Gluck which I find wrenching:
Hesitate To Call
Lived to see you throwing
Me aside. That fought
Like netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbing
In my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to see
That all that all flushed down
The refuse. Done?
It lives in me.
You live in me. Malignant.
Love, you ever want me, don't.
(My marginal note for the poem reads "Betrayal of the sacred. He was a party to her self-betrayal, unworthy of such a sacred embrace. She reasserts boundaries after the sack." )
My one observation of caution, which I don't think the author needs, is noting the high rate of suicide of the Confessional poets. She wisely, it seems to me, looks beyond mere self-confessional authenticity to find meaning in Truth and Beauty and "the faithful Holy One" of Hebrew Scriptures. Heidegger wrote that "Truth is the truth of being. Beauty does not occur apart from this truth…Thus beauty belongs to the advent of truth…Truth, as the truth of being, is a process, an event, which confers meaning and significance on to beings in the first place." Byung-Chul Han adds that "Eros means striving for what is binding." He philosophically laments, "The increasing volatility not only concerns the financial markets. At present, it takes hold of society as a whole. Nothing lasts or endures. The radical contingency awakens a longing for something that commits us, something beyond the ordinary. Today, we are faced with a crisis of beauty insofar as the beautiful is smoothened out into objects of pleasure, of the Like, into something arbitrary and comfortable. The saving of beauty is the saving of that which commits us." Libes has made it through in eros to the binding and has recently got hitched. (Weldon Kees, though not a Confessional poet, as a counter-example, seems to have dwelt in nihilism, and its denial of meaning, until it consumed him with his own hands- off the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Sea).
My strongest impressions from this volume are from her plaintive poems of lament. She writes in a confessional style like Sylvia Plath, whose poetry she studied, a style intimate, once taboo subjects. I remember writing a paper about Sylvia Path's poem "Daddy" in High School eons ago, a very intense poem about her relationship with her father and other abusive men, it is implied. Mrs. Libes is a graduate of the once great Columbia University, where Lionel Trilling used to teach, among a few other bright intellectual lights.
In the opening poem "Yellow" she describes her Jewish family's gathering on the evening of Pesach, or Passover. Amidst their celebration of the ancient religious tradition, they receive the news on the TV that Jews were not being let on campus. The eruptions of anti-Semitism on Columbia University campus and all over the United States, and abroad, were truly disturbing and the claims that it was just about Israeli policy and not about Jew hatred rang hollow. Indeed, there is an ancient Jew-hatred writ deep in Islam in many lines enjoining hatred and war against Jews and Christians in the Quran, Hadith, Sunna and Sharia, and forbidding friendship with them. Here is a moving record of a personal response of a soul to this new contrivance of sanctimonious hate.
Libes has the mysterious power of articulation that gathers somewhat beyond one's ken and whelms in its power and effect on the reader.
In "Princess Shulamith" she asks, it seems to me, about what the feminist empowerment of women might mean in the waning days of the United States' power. Then she brings it home yet more personally, asking what might capture her best in a windowpane, her relative wealth, or
"Is it a modest table stacked with books
That bear the imprints of my breathing?
Or is It yet a third, where,
Wedged between doctor and a husband
I am carrying the infant
Who shall pen the saga of my afterlife?"
She suggests that feminists have fomented, in destabilization of the West, their own demise. A feminism that can no longer define what a woman is very confused indeed.
She has a strong imaginative apprehension that enables her to convey through it a weighty sense of sacrilege or disenchantment that she rightly sees as a kind breaking of faith and fall of love. In "Horoscope," one of her lament poems, she plaintively evokes the death of love's hope in the face of betrayal…
"Remembering your yellow steed
Stamping out my fantasies
With scraggly hooves
As you were pleading on your knees
Burning up my magic books
As I adapt to trivialities
And trudge back home- "
"…I always thought that you were good
But I knew you wouldn't fight for me.
And I have wasted up my years
Bleaching out propriety
When I was just a toy to you
Fading in an afternoon."
I certainly feel a similar pain of loss and the feeling of having wasted years on vain love.
In "The Crematorium of Art" she valiantly and intelligently attacks the Progressive trashing of Truth and Beauty and their consequent devolution in apprehension.
"..Yet who am I to be so strict a judge of feeling?
I occupy myself with reason:
My work the brainchild of a dreamer
Expressive, complex, and at times, perhaps,
A bit jejeune- yet not enough to make a perfidy of liberty and right…"
"…Enough of setting altars to diversity
And burning white men at the stake."
Amen, sister. In this poem she also lamented a fixation on the physical looks of a poet. I listened with interest Dana Gioia's latest Youtube documentary, this on the poet Weldon Kees, and it is noteworthy he wed his nihilism with an impeccable sense of dress, but in the end was overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of it all. Gioia said he was the best dressed poet of the twentieth century.
"Stars" is another powerful lament poem:
"…I am peering at a gilded mirror in the bathroom
Like a Snow White's Evil Queen of pride
Hiding in that corner
Where you spoke your cruel bathetic purposeless
"Goodbye"
My makeup's smudged;
Purple bags besmirch my eyes
And I know you won't come back…"
She has a intelligent, ironic sense of humor and a valuable understanding of imaginative apprehension.
The lament continues,
"Tomorrow we will amble in each other's circles
Trapped within the same old horrid universe
Where music rings out for two people
But only one can hear the melody."
Who doesn't feel a little nihilistic at moments when dealing with unrequited or betrayed love?
The last poem in the volume is also one of these powerful laments. Her lament poems turn her personal sorrows and the struggles of her journey into fine works of art capturing perennial human suffering and permitting a degree of , a vein mined in their own way by the singer Patsy Cline, for instance, or by the contemporary singer Laufey, in their many lament songs. But I don't mean to peg Libes in this vein. She seems to have versatile powers.
I am reading through Louise Gluck's Poems 1962-2012 slowly, and was reminded a number of times of her powerful laments in her early collections, which seem to be about betrayed love, and also about the abortion she had as a result of the relationship. ("I killed for you…") Here is a short poem by Gluck which I find wrenching:
Hesitate To Call
Lived to see you throwing
Me aside. That fought
Like netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbing
In my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to see
That all that all flushed down
The refuse. Done?
It lives in me.
You live in me. Malignant.
Love, you ever want me, don't.
(My marginal note for the poem reads "Betrayal of the sacred. He was a party to her self-betrayal, unworthy of such a sacred embrace. She reasserts boundaries after the sack." )
My one observation of caution, which I don't think the author needs, is noting the high rate of suicide of the Confessional poets. She wisely, it seems to me, looks beyond mere self-confessional authenticity to find meaning in Truth and Beauty and "the faithful Holy One" of Hebrew Scriptures. Heidegger wrote that "Truth is the truth of being. Beauty does not occur apart from this truth…Thus beauty belongs to the advent of truth…Truth, as the truth of being, is a process, an event, which confers meaning and significance on to beings in the first place." Byung-Chul Han adds that "Eros means striving for what is binding." He philosophically laments, "The increasing volatility not only concerns the financial markets. At present, it takes hold of society as a whole. Nothing lasts or endures. The radical contingency awakens a longing for something that commits us, something beyond the ordinary. Today, we are faced with a crisis of beauty insofar as the beautiful is smoothened out into objects of pleasure, of the Like, into something arbitrary and comfortable. The saving of beauty is the saving of that which commits us." Libes has made it through in eros to the binding and has recently got hitched. (Weldon Kees, though not a Confessional poet, as a counter-example, seems to have dwelt in nihilism, and its denial of meaning, until it consumed him with his own hands- off the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Sea).
December 8, 2025
I haven't read poetry since I studied it in school but this reminded me of the feeling I got when reading Whitman and Plath. It makes me want to reread poetry again. Very much enjoyed this small collection of poems
March 31, 2026
4.25⭐
I do feel bad about giving this book 4 ⭐ because it was so close to 5, but I've always been a harsh rater of books so I rounded it down. sorry.
But that doesn't change the fact that the writing was exquisite and sensory. I also liked how Libes didn't try to preach or make the themes of her poems really obvious, and therefore there were so many layers of meaning that I will be re-reading every poem and I have already started.
Also I don't normally read poetry so maybe that's one of the reasons it wasn't 5⭐ for me, but honestly I'd recommend it to anyone trying to get back into poetry.
I do feel bad about giving this book 4 ⭐ because it was so close to 5, but I've always been a harsh rater of books so I rounded it down. sorry.
But that doesn't change the fact that the writing was exquisite and sensory. I also liked how Libes didn't try to preach or make the themes of her poems really obvious, and therefore there were so many layers of meaning that I will be re-reading every poem and I have already started.
Also I don't normally read poetry so maybe that's one of the reasons it wasn't 5⭐ for me, but honestly I'd recommend it to anyone trying to get back into poetry.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews