Overview
Combining extensive research into sexual violence with the author's personal experiences as a feminist activist, Girl Trouble provides a generational perspective on healing from trauma. ""Stop trying to write something beautiful / and write something true."" Girl Trouble is an excavation of female adolescence, a brazen journey through rape culture from the '80s to #MeToo. Diana Whitney's earthy poems spill secrets, make trouble, reckon with stories of desire and harm, and explore the agency and oppression of women and girls. Deeply rooted in the natural world, Girl Trouble grieves the planet's degradation while celebrating queerness and seeking healing for the next generation. By the end of the collection, a myriad of voices builds to a full-throated roar. This is a book for survivors and advocates, for mothers and daughters, for anyone moving through trauma with resilience.
Reviews
The poems in Girl Trouble aren’t messing around. In her newest collection, Diana Whitney has crafted a book of righteous rage, an anthem against frat boys, an ironic incantation against acquaintance rape, a guidebook to surviving an abortion clinic, and an entire alphabet of victim blaming. Girl Trouble triggers and warns, bears witness and refuses to look away. If the word “rape” in the very first poem sets off a bomb, the rest of this book is the shrapnel. Whitney says, “everyone trades/in the currency of girls.” In a country where one in four women are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes and a sexual assault against a woman happens every 68 seconds, she reminds us that a girl can strike out a boy in baseball or reel in a bass, but it’s never enough. 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 constant barrage of threats and harms, referencing Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Nassar alongside a tractor parked in an idyllic pasture bearing a bumper sticker demanding to see a woman’s breasts. Whitney knows that when you are a woman in America, the danger will never stop, so it is no mistake that this collection begins with Thelma and Louise, those symbols of discomfort and extremity in response to the extreme. “I’m the only one still/tending the story,” Whitney says. As women’s faces are wiped off government websites and hard-won rights shrink before our very eyes, Girl Trouble is a book that punches back. Readers of every gender, put down whatever you are doing and pick up this unstoppable book. For its painful education. Its strength. Its heartbreak. For the sounding of its essential alarm. -- Jennifer Militello, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire An unruly, artful growl from the heart, a paean to raising adolescent girls, Diana Whitney’s Girl Trouble is born unto trouble, born to make the good, necessary trouble that confronts and resists the hostility of rape culture. With her “ears pricked & finger on the power,” Whitney offers solace and solidarity to survivors of trauma. Her poems are armed with love and ire, wit and lyric, and the “shiny black/ berries of wrath & repair.” This is an angry and beautiful celebration of the bravery of desire. -- Corwin Ericson, author of Checked Out OK “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
Author Information
Diana Whitney is a queer writer and educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of two full-length poetry collections, Wanting It and Dark Beds. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana works as a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.
