Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Girl Trouble
by Diana Whitney
CavanKerry Press
April 2026, $18.00, 96 pages, ISBN:978-1960327192
“I raise the iron forged out of fury,” Diana Whitney writes in the poem, “Queen of Swords.” Girl Trouble is essentially a collection of poems about rape – violence, date rape, acquaintance rape, the abuse of powerless girls by gymnastics instructors and swimming coaches, the predatory behavior of Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk, the vulnerability of girls in school — middle school, high school, college. Whitney also addresses the rape of the planet, which comes from the same destructive, patriarchal impulses of greed and power. So much of the drama takes place in the youth jungle of school settings – high school, college, even middle school (junior high) and earlier.
And yes, Diana Whitney’s fury is loud and clear.
The title poem begins, “When the trouble began she was barely / eleven.” And so danger starts at an early age. “My 6th-Grade Self Strikes Out with Jason Tournay,” and “My 7th-Grade Self Sends Nudes to Nate Griffin” (The poem ends: “Give me an A+ in English. Watch me / ruin my name.”) develop the theme. Whitney writes about a sixteen-year-old girl getting drunk and raped in “Steubenville Sestina,” another schoolgirl playing truth or dare in “Centerfold,” and then in “Let Me Walk You Through It,” she details the abortion, and it all feels so inevitable.
And that’s just part one, the first fifteen poems that make up the section titled “Troubled and Troubling,” which includes “Under My Thumb,” after that 1966 Rolling Stones song.
The way she talks when she’s spoken to
down to me Mick keeps singing, my mother
keeps dancing & I carry the notes, the refrain
of the women, the rhythms echoing
down the cold centuries
intimate, braided into our DNA, imprinted
insistent & strange in the old song till I reach
in the jukebox, tip the needle off the vinyl,
s c r a t c h into silence but not gone.
In part two, “Cross Me Twice,” Whitney comes out swinging against the frat boys, her fury blazing. The scene has switched to college, the savagery only more intense. “Hate Poem for Animal House” starts:
Frat boys I hate you in plural, in flannel, in ball-caps on backwards
holding court on the balcony, brick kingdom of kinship casting
judgment below. I hate your grand pillared houses of debauchery
still standing, prime real estate increasing tenfold, lifelong capital return
on your Hell Week paid out in networks of power.
You see them, the entitled narcissists, carelessly taking what they think is rightfully theirs, little Donald Trumps in their Mar-al-Lago kingdoms, claiming what they decide that they must have, disregarding the needs of anybody but themselves. The poem ends: “And I hate the mothers
the mothers of frat boys, the ones who raise them, the one
who told me in earnest, in tears I’m sorry your daughter got hurt
but I have to believe my son.
A few poems later, in “Sons and Mothers,” she elaborates:
Call me a killjoy
but these are not
nice boys, they are not
good citizens, what you don’t
know can hurt you
or hurt somebody smaller.
These are the boys we think of when we use the term “date rape.” If the Rolling Stones served as inspiration in the first part, Diana Murphy channels Courtney Love to get her point across here. The poem “acrostic dispatch from the ’90s” is after Courtney Love. It starts:
was it good for you was it everything you wanted
did she show you her soft edge her babydoll panties
asking for attention the girl with the most cake prom queen
for life crowned and screaming mascara smeared wasn’t
it drunk and easy back then there was date rape and there
was real rape and neither one belonged in a mouth
Brutal poem after brutal poem open the savage wounds. “Phantom,” composed of a “Mother” part and a “Daughter” part, spells out the fate of girls as if from the mouth of an ancient oracle (“This is how it happened as it has happened before / over fourteen generations…,” echoing the insight in “Under My Thumb”). “Tiny Stars” is a heartbreaking poem in which a girl is given a rescue cat to care for, a sort of consolation prize after she is raped, her parents feeling helpless, guilty, ashamed (“…when we learned what / the boy had done to you…”):
Do you remember, we will say,
when the world changed forever?
I could not protect you
but we kept that animal alive.
Even brothers can’t be trusted to look out for their sisters. In part one, in the poem “After School with D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” we see them huddled over video games: “Upstairs, your big brother / and his friend Andy Peet locked into Atari, blasted Q107, / stashed dirty magazines, scoffed at our games.” In “Big Brothers” Whitney writes:
I learned the cost of your attention: I owed you
my body. No big deal, just kids messing around
but let me go back and push your warm hand
out of my lap.
“For Women: How to Prevent Acquaintance Rape (1988)” is a found poem, one that is composed of lines taken from non-poetic sources, a sort of literary collage. Whitney’s source is Robin Warshaw’s I Never Called it Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape.
Girl Trouble is composed of four sections. The third is perhaps the grimmest. Titled “Open Secret,” it contains eight poems whose subject is the teenage victims of the gymnastics and swimming coaches who preyed on innocent athletes, the Larry Nassars and Megan Garbers, and the Jeffrey Epsteins. Three of the poems in this section, in fact, are titled “Girls Who Had Nothing,” which Whitney explains in a note comes from the testimony of one of Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors who was instructed to bring him girls who fit that description – runaways, kids from broken homes that no one would protect. Two of the poems are likewise “found poems,” composed entirely from the voices of Epstein’s survivors. The poem “Dominion,” which features blacked-out text, like something from a redacted legal file, includes the chilling line, “When you’re rich / you can do anything.” How like Donald Trump’s memorable words in the Access Hollywood tape, for which he never suffered any real consequences, only tarnished his already-tarnished reputation a little bit more.
Girl Trouble conflates the rape of vulnerable girls with the destruction of the climate – the same greedy power-hungry impulses driving the narrative. In pieces like “Glitter” and “Supercollider” Whitney’s fury and dismay are vivid.
The final section, “Praise the Ending,” may provide some consolation, but there are also more rape poems – “Body Count,” “Constellation of Satellites.” Still, “Praise Poem for 8th Grade Graduation,” from which the section title comes, “My 18-Year-Old Self Tells Chris Warren to Wear a Condom” (he doesn’t, but in the revision the narrator “draws a line”), and “Ode to Susan, X-Ray Technician,” which also includes aspirational images, offer some comfort. “Ode to Susan…” ends:
I would have traveled with you anywhere then—
to the Andromeda Galaxy, to Jupiter’s moons,
to a parallel universe where time runs backwards
and all the captains are women.
The poems in Girl Trouble burn with fury and expose the heart of shame. This is a powerful collection.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.