Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney
Eve Esfandiari-Denney's poetry collection girling uses girlhood to interrogate the shifting landscape of modernity
In Eve Esfandiari-Denney’s Girling, the word becomes more than its associated verb (being a girl) and assumes an entire logic within the collection's poetic world. Girling, the verb, encompasses experiences from the banal to the transformative – and those that are both – producing an effect of both satire and poignancy.
At times, it feels as if the poems’ address switches between that of speaking to a close friend and that of speaking to a past, future, or higher self. The effect is a register of intimacy which begins at a cultural level and grows into one that is distinctly cosmic and existential. From pop culture to online references, Esfandiari-Denney treats contemporary culture as a repository of references to establish closeness. The speaker’s history is equally traceable. In the way that ‘girling’ becomes an ironic commentary, the contemporary moment becomes a point of discussion for broader ideas of lineage, anxiety, and grief. The collection moves between the grotesque and the sentimental to paint stories that prove to us that angst is not an adolescent but a timeless feeling. Esfandiari-Denney writes beautifully, alarmingly, and at times, grossly. Readers could pick a page at random and be sucked in by the way she moves between interrogating a world of words, sounds, and light, and the one plagued and blessed by the Internet and all that modernity has wrought.
