The book is poems, even poems that more seem like inner musings from an author who’s used TikTok and Instagram a lot.

[…] I’m thinking: Girling. It’s like the word duckling. The diminutive ‘ling’ making ‘girl’ smaller. A Girling could be something like a Girlette, or in order of descending size: Women > Girl > Girling. But it seems Hailey was saying Girling as if to amplify her very own verb: to girl. Would it be so out of the question then to assume Hailey is taking custody of girl’? Girling forth so to speak, Girling forth in a white effortless moment.

Votive Portraits of Traveller Girlgods

A virgin who cannot drive

is so non-weight-bearing. The soft discs of her hips are uncompressed from hovering. Placed on her head is a still crown of upright wedding photographs. Yet her stomach moves, remains in an unfolding process.

A kind of flowering from a taut shell of red, pink and water. There is no control, this is totally determined. It is the same as distilled clarity; her key ring spells Destiny with a key to a locked cloud and cuttlefish bone she cannot drive.

She sighs, separates snow from darks, lights the wick of a blue scented candle.

The book is a gaze into life for young persons today. Simultaneously, the book invites the reader to poetry that is not pared down to its bare–boned Robert Frost-ish essentials. As I read the book, I got the sense that half of it was consciously written as throwaway prose, discardable information as though it were written by Wendy Erskine or Colin Barrett.

The book is fleeting and easily forgotten, but its contents are, a few per cent of the book, memorable.

Girling is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions on 2025-09-10.