GIRL TROUBLE

“Diana Whitney has crafted a book of righteous rage, an anthem against frat boys, a guide to surviving an abortion clinic, and an entire alphabet of victim blaming. Girl Trouble triggers and warns, bears witness, and refuses to look away. With a table of contents that reads with the delicate honesty of whispers exchanged behind closed doors, the relentless litany of this collection captures the barrage of threats and harm we face. Whitney knows that when you are a woman in America, the danger will never stop, so it is no mistake that she begins with Thelma and Louise, those symbols of discomfort and extremity in response to the extreme. As women’s faces are wiped off government websites and our hard-won rights shrink before our eyes, Girl Trouble punches back. Readers of every gender, put down whatever you are doing and pick up this unstoppable book.”
— Jennifer Militello, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire

“‘Stop trying to write something beautiful / and write something true.’ Diana Whitney’s formally daring and deeply subversive poems trouble what must be troubled, what cannot be left as is, including language itself. Girl Trouble knows, as Muriel Rukeyser did, that a woman telling the truth about her life means “the world would split open.” This book is a woman telling truth after truth, splitting the entire multiverse open. It’s a woman’s celebration of her own sensual experience, it’s a mother’s heartrending and heart-restoring testimony, it’s an axe to patriarchy, it’s a wise and downright fun revision of adolescence, and it’s a love song for the too-often unsung feminist ways of knowing. “I’m not saying I’m a mermaid but I swim with that / grace.”
— Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

“It would be easy to call the poems in Girl Trouble fearless, but they are not, nor is the poet who expertly crafted them. Diana Whitney’s smart, dynamic poems about the realities of living in rape culture—from her own childhood and adolescence through to her daughters’—accomplish something far braver. These poems acknowledge the perpetual fear and the constant possibility and aftermath of harm, and they continue onward anyway. Girl Trouble heroically reminds us of where we have been and even begins to imagine a future where, as the poet says, ‘your body counts too.’”
— Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence