Girl Soldier Is Almost Here!
Your Companion Guide to the World of Girl Soldier (And How You Can Snag a FREE Personalized Signed Copy!)
Girl Soldier is here—and she’s already marching.
Several days ago, I submitted the final edited version of Girl Soldier to Amazon KDP. As of today, the book has already sold 23 eBook copies, snagging to the #1 spot in the category “Women’s Poetry.”
My dream has always been to be a widely read published author, and I want to thank each and every one of you Pens and Poison readers for helping me get there. The book officially drops on November 15th, and my goal is to hit 100 sales in the book’s pre-order months. If you’d like to support my work, consider picking up a copy. I promise that the poems won’t disappoint!
As a thank you to the 23 wonderful people who have already made my dream possible, I’d love to take you all into the world of Girl Soldier today with a little behind the scenes post. I know that poetry can be scary or downright inaccessible to many people, and I want to do as much as I can to make my poems more digestible so that everyone can enjoy them.
So here’s a little bit about Girl Soldier.
What Is Girl Soldier?
Girl Soldier is my fourth poetry collection and the first that I’ve released since securing an Internet audience. While my first three collections had some one-off gems, I didn’t spend as much time with my previous poetry books simply because I didn’t think anyone outside of my friends and family would ever be reading them. With Girl Soldier, I wanted to redefine the way I write poetry—I was no longer going to let mediocre, half-baked thoughts make their way onto the page. I was going to hold my work to a higher standard.
I’d like to think that Girl Soldier is the poetic equivalent of an album you can listen to straight through without skipping any tracks. It’s a collection of 19 carefully curated poems that tackle memory, art, and desire through witty banter and (hopefully) memorable lines. It’s a collection that chronicles the adventures of the last three years of my life in all its highs and lows while asking poignant questions about the world around us: What is memory? What is desire? What is it like being a woman in the 21st century who doesn’t really hate men?
To me, poetry has always meant tackling the universal through the particular. I know that the feelings of love, desire, hopelessness, and bliss that I’ve felt over the past several years are emotions we all share as members of the human race. In Girl Soldier, I do what I do best: tell stories—whether fictional or diaristic—about the world that we all inhabit in hopes of making sense of people, feelings, and society. I hope that you’ll share a piece of me in these poems and see a piece of yourself in one of my many stories.
Inside the World of Girl Soldier
Girl Soldier’s 19 poems cycle through desire, loss, and identity. The collection starts off with Yellow, a poem that was inspired by a family Passover Seder in the wake of the October 7th attacks. After exploring Jewish identity and the state of antisemitism in the world today, the book enters the realm of the personal with Farmer’s Market, a brief meditation on aging, maternal love, and the importance of bearing children. The first two poems set the stage for the collection’s title poem Girl Soldier, which establishes the tone of the remainder of the work. In Girl Soldier, love becomes an extended war metaphor as its speaker is forced to come to terms with the uglier sides of desire. The poem presents the central thesis of the collection: to love is to be at war, and to endure is to find beauty in that conflict—or to create beauty out of it.
The collection’s next poem dives headfirst into an exploration of the book’s thesis through a whimsical relationship between a working class boy and an upper-class girl. Featuring tea shops, garden parties, and newsboy hats, Sunday Evening Paper Boy depicts the ugly side of desire as it tackles class differences and asks whether love is possible across class divides.
Rousseau is the first poem in the collection written directly from personal experience. Addressing a former lover, the poem presents a fuller scope of my understanding of desire: love is universal to all human beings, but it is also often restricted to just two people who speak a language that no one else can understand. The poem, of course, alludes to the writings of Rousseau, who is perhaps most famous for envisioning a pre-civilizational peaceful state of nature in which all human beings could love one another without restraint. The theme of love’s innocence (and the loss thereof) resurfaces later in the collection.
The collection’s next poem, Princess Shulamith, is a reference not to the Biblical Shulamith but to Shulamith Firestone, the radical feminist activist who led the second-wave feminist movement. The short poem asks whether it was worth it for women to achieve liberation and whether women are really better off now—swarming the corporate world and having fewer kids than ever—than they were back in the 1950s. I often go back and forth on this question, and I don’t have an answer. Maybe you can help me decide.
I develop the corporate theme in Mercantilism, a poem inspired by my own foray into the business world after only having ever dealt with writing and academia. Interestingly enough, Mercantilism opens with Socrates and ends with Aeneas, suggesting that there is value to processing information through the lens of the ancients the wisdom that they can bring us today. We then return to the idyllic with Peace, a poem that balances longing for fairy-tale life with hope for artistic immortality, attempting to define the meaning of “peace” as it asks whether peace is ever truly possible. Similarly, Yorick is a meditation on memory and decay—an homage of sorts to a Shakespearean memento mori. Yorick, of course, is a reference to the famous skull of Hamlet’s old friend in Act 5.
With Horoscope, the collection takes a sharp turn into a more chaotic world, rekindling the theme of love and violence through an imagined relationship that goes deeply awry. Horoscope was inspired by a strangely erotic dream I had several years ago and therefore reads quite literally like a surreal fever dream. It is by far the collection’s most violent and angry poem, but it is a personal favorite of mine. The title is an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris.
The next three poems—The Bostonians, Falling, and Après-Midi—are all shorter takes on the disillusionment of desire in various ways. The first of these three poems, which I like to think of as a mini cycle, alludes to the novel by Henry James. Après-Midi alludes to both Monet’s Vetheuil, Apres-Midi D'Automne and Debussy’s Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune. From there, we cut to Loose Change—the oldest poem that made the final cut for the collection—which was inspired by memories of my childhood home. These memories might be worth something, but we often toss them around aimlessly like loose change.
The Crematorium of Art is something of an outlier in the collection. I contemplated taking it out many times, but I felt that many Pens and Poison readers would resonate with the poem, and sometimes we just need a good political manifesto. The poem is essentially a poetic rendition of my many essays on the death of art at the hands of the far left. It’s not my favorite poem, but it certainly makes some important points about the current state of culture in our society, so I felt that it was worth keeping for variety.
I’ve saved the best poems for last, and finally, we get into my favorite section of Girl Soldier, which features some of my most personal poems and some of the collection’s most quotable lines. This section starts off with Cabaret, a poem that paints life as perpetual performance, and then segues into Indigo Arcadia, which revisits the theme of peace in the state of nature. From there, we get my favorite poem in the collection, which is Stars—a personal poem concerning a fatalistic love affair that inspired the cover of the book.
Finally, we get Babies/Little Me. As its title suggests, the poem revisits the theme of childbirth through an epic seven-section structure that charts the birth and death of a relationship. This particular poem is based on the fictional relationship in my novel The Leverkühn Quartet and weaves together scraps of writings and poetic fragments that didn’t make the final cut in the novel. It ends with a revelation that I like to think of as the poetic resolution to much of the angst present throughout the collection. You’ll have to pick up a copy to find out just what that revelation might be.
Astronaut is something of a coda poem. It departs from my usual sprawling, maximalist poetic style in an homage to David Bowie’s Major Tom, ending the collection with a somewhat sobering thought about the loneliness in our world.
Girl Soldier is my most ambitious work yet, and I can't wait to share it with you soon.
I hope that you’ll love it.
Snag a FREE Personalized Signed Copy of Girl Soldier!
Girl Soldier is available for Kindle pre-order, but if you’re not a Kindle reader or are categorically opposed to eBooks, I have some great news for you—as a thank you to my wonderful Pens and Poison readers, you can pick up a limited edition physical signed copy of Girl Soldier ahead of its release by becoming a new yearly paid subscriber. From September 22nd to October 15th, all new yearly paid Pens and Poison subscribers will receive a FREE personalized signed copy of Girl Soldier in the mail! So don’t forget to snag your yearly paid subscription, and I’ll be in touch from there to mail you an advanced signed copy ahead of the collection’s release.
You can also head on over to Instagram and enter my Girl Soldier giveaway here.
Girl Soldier will be available for print order on Amazon on November 15th.
In the meantime, let me know what you think of themes of the collection in the comments below. Thanks again for all of your support and thoughts. None of this would be possible without you.
I can’t wait to bring the collection to you soon.
