What Girls Do in the Dark

by Rosie Garland

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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2020

About the author

Born in London to a runaway teenager, Rosie has always been a cuckoo in the nest. She's an eclectic writer and performer, ranging from singing in post-punk gothic band The March Violets, through touring with the Subversive Stitch exhibition in the 90s to her alter-ego Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen, cabaret chanteuse and mistress of ceremonies.

She has published five solo collections of poetry and her award-winning short stories, poems and essays have been widely anthologized. She is winner of the DaDa Award for Performance Artist of the Year and a Poetry Award from the People's Café, New York. Her most recent poetry collection, 'Everything Must Go' (Holland Park Press 2012) draws on her experience of throat cancer.

She won the Mslexia Novel competition in 2012 and her debut novel 'The Palace of Curiosities' was published in March 2013 by HarperCollins. Her second novel, 'Vixen', (Borough Press 2014) is now available in all formats.

Reviews

[Arlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another brilliant collection from the High Priestess of Goth. Beautiful, striking reflections on mortality, metaphysics, mythology and why women should be angry actually. I think St Catherine was my favourite. Highly recommend this.

[Jamie ⚢ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I fear I did not understand

[Jeanette Greaves · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took my time with this. Poetry can't be rushed, and I've dipped into this book many times over the last couple of months.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

An utterly confusing read. Almost none of the poems made sense to me. I'm all for a little mystery in poetry, but this really gave me nothing.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her new poetry collection What Girls Do In The Dark, Rosie Garland is on a bodily mission. The collection opens on a set of poems concerned, often surreally, with planetary bodies; in the first poem, ‘Letter of rejection from a Black Hole’, Garland rhetorically refutes the ‘smothering of […] radiance’, insisting on substance and presence both spiritual and physical, ‘the difference between obliteration of the cosmos and the spirit’. This conflation of astronomy and humanity continues in ‘Snuffing hearts that burn too bright’, in which a woman, seated next to an awkward singeing star on a bus ride, insists that she ‘know[s] how to deal with heavenly bodies’. She draws parallels with her own power for destruction, for an exertion on the world around her, ‘if I put my mind to it’. These poems set up a nuanced duality between cosmological and earthbound bodies (human, mostly female) – an understandable and understood separateness, air, atmosphere, the vacuum of space delineating the vast distance, generally/hopefully speaking, between human and celestial bodies. Yet there is overlap, be it in the conscious deconstruction of the former poem, or the more accepted analogy in the latter – we can learn about our own bodies, and the spirits dwelling within, by looking out, up. So it’s reasonable, a few poems later, to glance up at birds, animal bodies acting as a bridge between us and the great beyond. In ‘Extinction events’, a narrative poem describing the fall and death of a rook turns suddenly personal, lyrical, meditating on mental faculty and bodily control. The horror of the final lines – ‘I squat inside the bland / shell of the skull, contents slippery’ – is borne firstly by the visceral imagery of living inside a wet cracked egg, and secondly by the helplessness denoted, the prenatal regression, an unrecognisable body. The following poem, ‘The correct hanging of game birds’, recounts how best to display dead birds, a continuation and reinforcement of the mood at the end of the preceding poem: horror, decay, helplessness, the threat or implication of violence but never its immediate portrayal. Describing a person or body as ‘birdlike’, often applied to the feminine, implies frailty; in examining parallels between the human body and the bird body, Garland is pivoting from the majesty (and magnitude) of heavenly bodies to something more fraught. Though birds have the enviable promise of flight and freedom, their stature and fragility – coupled with the fact that birds are easy prey – evoke the vulnerability of the human. And, again, the vulnerability of women in a world of men: ‘Each man has his taste’ with regards to the hanging of the birds, and the birds are both feminised (‘from breast to breast’, ‘a rope of pearls around the neck’) and referred to with female pronouns. Here the reader understands the multiplicity of the collection’s title; in the dark, girls are black holes and/or stars, destroying themselves and/or those around them. But they are also hunted, abused, threatened outside of their own bodies and spirits, empowerment and debasement equally likely. ‘Saint Catherine’ is resolved with a quietly belligerent declaration; ‘Under the gospel, / the truth of it: woman answers back, ends up dead.’ And throughout the collection there is an almost frantic, deeply queer compulsion to transcend the body, best articulated in ‘Eczema’: a wish to ‘escape / the pelt that binds her silent’, calling to mind The Yellow Wallpaper, the peeling away of an oppressive skin, the discovery of a new liberated self underneath. The body, forever at odds with the other bodies of the world and universe, is never free to exist independently of all that is mapped onto it. In such poems as ‘Personal aphelion’, ‘Scar’ and ‘Heirlooms’, the significance of wounds and scars recurs, cataloguing and accounting for them, the inevitability of acquiring them. Yet the body is also inconsequential, as seen at the end of ‘Heirlooms’: ‘Grandmother sings me to sleep. Her stories are true / on the inside, where it matters. The outside is embroidery.’ Prioritising the spirit and its insistence, its resilience. Throughout a collection constantly celebrating ‘the strangeness that makes you strong’, Rosie Garland inverses the classic nature poem to tremendous effect: for Garland, the natural world is found and understood from within the human experience (unlike traditional nature poetry, which arguably looks out first, in order to then look in). Stars, comets, birds, foxes, oceans, airports, sisters – a variety of bodies, some natural, others imposing on the natural, but something running through each of them. In many of the final poems, from ‘Stargazer’ to the finale, ‘Bowing out’, Garland returns to the expanse of space, itself constantly expanding outwards, ‘breathing out’, growth and reach exponential. In there she sees the spirit again: flight over fall, radiance over ubiquity, life over destruction. (Review originally written for Lunate.)

[paula. · Rating 3 out of 5]

there were some beautiful lines in here

"the star blushes, embarrassed combustion tickling the / baby on the row behind."
"I lack the knack / of mirroring a father's nose, a mother's chin; can't figure how / to plagiarise their features into my own."
"under the gospel, / the truth of it: woman answer back, ends up dead."
"the unfeathering / of the intellect" "plummet in a reverse evolution"
"how each wound finds itself healing / in the opposite of itself, how something that is not finishing / bends itself into a return."
"I couldn't see I was / kissing men to inoculate against / a gravity pulling in the opposite / direction [...] the impossible / escape velocity from my queer core."

but there was feelings carrying me through the collection that were missing.
i had momentary heartburns but ultimately couldn't connect. some sentences felt clumsy, some poems felt like reiterations of each other. i admire the craft that is behind a lot of little phrases, i just wish it they were put together more succinctly.

favourite poems:
- snuffing hearts that burn too bright
- palimpsest
- heirlooms
- saint catherine
- eczema
- personal aphelion
- scar
- perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape
- post mortem
- when words collide

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"She lifts her skirt, shows the crescent stitching
from hip-bone to thigh. From this I birthed my twin,
she says. To her I give my aches and pains; my injuries.
She stores them safe, away from harm.
One day you will discover your own twin
to walk alongside you through life's bombardment."

from "Heirlooms"

If you've felt yourself too wild, too mad, too feyling-stitched for the world's approbation, forget the world, darling, and turn to Rosie Garland's poems. You'll find women and creatures within who press insistent against the bindings of pages that would trap them against their true natures: dizzying, spectral, roaring-hearted manifestations make up this writing, and I've been wandering headlong into the places they go, all my knives out and glistening.

[Michael Houghton · Rating 3 out of 5]

2024 No11
Mixed bag. My favourite poem was ‘Snuffing hearts that burn too bright’. Sometimes the language got in the way of me feeling anything. I liked the sci-fi aspect most of all. Though some ideas are repeated and poems that weren’t sci-fi got lost a bit imo. Overall enjoyable.

[Melody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thrilling. Enthralling. Captivating. Not quite sure which is my favourite since I pretty much bookmarked them all.

[Amy]

I enjoyed and connected to some of the poems but not every one. I did like the running motifs of space through and how they were placed in the collection.

[Ilse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really not bad, just not my cup of tea.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

favourite poems are ‘eczema’ and ‘post mortem’

[Nina Parmenter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love this collection and have revisited it many times. Starry and sad and surreal and fearless. This is the kind of poetry that excites me and gets my brain sparking.

[iina · Rating 4 out of 5]

An almost-accidental find in a queer bookshop, so glad I stumbled upon this. Dog-eared a few favourites, and will be seeking out Garland’s other collections soon!

[Cuppa Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*