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