Girl Work

Poet and essayist Zefyr Lisowski's prize-winning book

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.

"Zefyr Lisowski's GIRL WORK is, among so many other powerful things, a meditation on the passage of time. It befriends memory even as it interrogates it. Lisowski commits to the work of considering the body, and in doing so makes ethereal what could otherwise be grueling: violence, aging, beauty. Here is the rare collection that resists nostalgia, yet welcomes the past as an estranged lover or former friend. GIRL WORK is not merely embodied--it is hungry, it is cold, and it remembers what happened. Lisowski makes art of what one can never forget."--Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

Poetry. Film. LGBTQ+ Studies.