What Girls Do in the Dark

Rosie Garland

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781913437053
• eBook ISBN: 9781913437060
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

'Garland is a real literary talent: definitely an author to watch' - Sarah Waters

Perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape

1986 apparition was the least

favourable on record the worst

viewing for Earth observers

for the last 2,000 years

Khartoum, 1986. Pressed between man

and concrete balcony, I wait

for promised fireworks. To spark belief

this trapped feeling is flirtation,

I swig arak, the local firewater

that strafes the throat with gasoline.

I’m just a girl who can’t believe she’s here

until his attention sketches me from smoke

to solid. Alcohol mimics fullness,

but drains far too quickly through my punctures.

There.

He smears a finger across the sky, points at a blur

too dim for the name comet.

No. There.

Halley. I thought we had a deal. You’d

stage a perfect flyby, a bells-and-whistles

shawl of flame across the sky, and I would

toe the narrow line of girl-wants-boy. But

you’re playing peekaboo on the wrong

side of the sun, ripping up the book on

stellar etiquette and bending orbit to your

own kinked rules, while I’m trudging a

half-life in the mud of other people’s

fairy tales. One day my prince will, etc.

I tip back another mouthful, gag, see stars of sorts. Out there,

Halley is trying to get the message through my signal crackle;

remind me how once upon a time

I splashed outside the lines;

didn’t know it was

a mess, and didn’t care. Before

I learned the science of satisfaction

was a man to fill my void with fitting colour.

Frightened of what life is like on other planets,

I hogtied to the safe trajectory of marriage, husband, happy ever.

orbital eccentricity

deviates from a perfect circle irregular shape

Halley orbits the sun in the opposite direction

to the planets

Imaginary lines drawn in the sky.

No straight path through the universe;

not for Halley, not for me. Size of

a moon, and I couldn’t see I was

kissing men to inoculate against

a gravity pulling in the opposite

direction. Running halfway round

the globe to achieve the impossible,

escape velocity from my queer core.

Late for his own perihelion, Halley skirts the thin breath of Mercury;

dodging asteroids, sprinkling meteors like kisses.

A bearded beauty teetering the tightrope,

he is all kinds of unruly. Has had

ten thousand revolutions to

imperfect his bona to vada

your dolly shriek up and

down the back alley

of the solar system,

and I have

just the

one.

its dynamics cha otic

and unpredictable on long timescales

veering from orbit

Tonight or never.

On Halley’s return I will be dust

that sifts the space between worlds.

Can keep shredding myself

with repetition

of what I don’t want,

don’t need; or accept

I’m erratic,

path spiced with deviation.

as Halley approaches the Sun, it expels

jets of sublimating gas from its surface

which knock it off its orbital path

great enough

to significantly alte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Letter of rejection from a Black Hole
• Trans-Neptunian objects
• Snuffing hearts that burn too bright
• Yorkshire lights
• Making Thunder Roar
• Palimpsest
• Caroline Herschel observes the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, June 1783
• What girls do in the dark
• Heirlooms
• How can a woman sleep when the Master is in pain?
• Eloping with a comet
• The topiary garden
• Saint Catherine
• The last pangolin
• Extinction events
• The correct hanging of game birds
• You can begin at almost any point
• Wicker men
• They are an oddness
• Phrenologist
• Eczema
• Planetary wobble
• Long exposure
• The dark at the end of the tunnel
• Fox rising
• Quicksand
• Sleep of reason
• Personal aphelion
• Dancing the plank
• Scar
• Self-portrait as Halley’s comet
• Perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape
• Dark Matter
• Her name means Electricity
• The correct digging of latrines
• Goods to declare
• Biography of a comet in the body of a dog
• Auto-da-fé
• Plunge
• Stargazer
• Now that you are not-you
• There is no there there
• The devil’s in them
• Bede writes a history of the English people
• And yet it moves
• Since visiting the CERN Large Hadron Collider, you realise what you’ve been doing wrong with your life
• Post mortem
• How to keep breathing
• When worlds collide
• The autobiographies of stars
• Bowing out
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the author and this book