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.
Author
Born in London to a runaway teenager, Rosie has always been a cuckoo in the nest. She's an eclectic writer and performer, ranging from singing in post-punk gothic band The March Violets, through touring with the Subversive Stitch exhibition in the 90s to her alter-ego Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen, cabaret chanteuse and mistress of ceremonies. She has published five solo collections of poetry and her award-winning short stories, poems and essays have been widely anthologized. She is winner of the DaDa Award for Performance Artist of the Year and a Poetry Award from the People's Café, New York. Her most recent poetry collection, 'Everything Must Go' (Holland Park Press 2012) draws on her experience of throat cancer. She won the Mslexia Novel competition in 2012 and her debut novel 'The Palace of Curiosities' was published in March 2013 by HarperCollins. Her second novel, 'Vixen', (Borough Press 2014) is now available in all formats.
