magine, Whitney writes. Imagine, for yourself, the voice that is needed in this stumbling dark. Imagine what you wanted that night. Dream that you can have it. Now reach You wanted the last word? Take it. Redefine experience, reshape meaning and heal. No voice has achieved quite the fullness, power and presence, that Diana Whitney’s poetry collection, Girl Trouble has succeeded in creating. Brutally open and devastatingly fantastic, Whitney’s line is to be affirmed by the word: fingers dipped in oil, anointing of the brow, browbreathtaking.
Greatest of its aspects is this, Girl Trouble allows. It asks for your feelings, those too big and others half-formed. It demands; uplifts the listener in their anger—cheering on my roaring at “Frat boys ... singular [and] plural,” whose remembered touches, entitled and sticky, kept me awake at night no more than their mother’s “earnest” tears (23). Whitney’s meter, the charge in saying my hate, plainly, caught me quick and saw me through, until the continual address and repeated phrases became a mantra of redress. She saw my boredom, my childhood restlessness that landed me in all the “bad attention,” so that regret and shame nearly raked me over the coals (11). Then it gave me joy, pure and unintelligible queer joy, where language was explored and reality rediscovered: “I spike the punch with my 100-proof desire / No one ... gropes me tonight. I’m unafraid” (17). The form itself is given freedom, moving more in a stream of consciousness flow as the dreaming overtakes us, and we become “the unsung star ... remaking the world in an instant” (17). Who isn’t overcome by that? As a queer woman myself, I couldn’t stop the smart in my cheek from grinning for how it drew me in, granting me the cheesy thrill of my favorite 80’s/90’s films but making the star me: free and brave enough to reach out.
Beyond the imagery or diction, separate from the mastery of rhythm in her line, it is the connection between emotions that drive this collection. And equal to joy is how Girl Trouble stood firm in my fear, the weight of hindsight that strikes whenever I can be triggered by the mirror image of an old traumatic wound. Before, the opening poem beckoned, remember that time so free as when “I kept the thrill of the open road,” while Whitney’s speaker twines our white-knuckled grip together at the wheel:
“I take the girls’ hands. Thelma and Louise / are holding hands too. This is the only way, /I try to explain. They have no choice, / not in this world.”
It is apt that the page should open on motherhood for I felt a strong maternal lens in much of the speaker’s tone. There is guidance and strength in “Let Me Walk You Through It,” brutal honesty, loss, and inspiration in “Hum,” but in all there is acceptance, offered simple and plain, despite the jagged edges.
The collection stokes an understanding along our first perceptions of care, fear, and tenderness, those from our earliest relationships: our parents. Motherhood then, here, becomes a fractal or prism—presenting a strange duality of shattered glass through which the speaker navigates both their blooming panic and their instinct to shield another from it. Whitney holds that balance between healing and tension, the narrow line between internal rupture and outward gentleness, especially in this opening scene where the daughter’s need for action, reaction, and motivation kindles under the speaker’s quiet stitching of themselves back together. At once, I imagined the speaker to play both roles in each poem, this present day self granting the younger what was needed in that time: support, anger, control, or revision. The moment builds a structure of reflection within the speaker, not only what has been survived but how it is now being narrated: softened and translated for the young.
Her voice is a harmonic thrum throughout the work: a steady, intentional quietness that feels shaped by the weight of what motherhood requires, not protection alone, but the awareness of how one’s own pain is witnessed, expressed, and transformed. It is not only that understanding the thing gives it voice; it is important because Whitney does so with an extraordinary tenderness to the self that cannot help but be mirrored. These poems suggest a speaker who learns, or is learning, the necessity of gentleness even in the presence of great fracture, and so the voice becomes what was always needed someone who knows the darkest moments intimately and still chooses to arrive with warmth, clarity, and patience:
The work of this writing is that such care becomes transferable, crossing the boundary between page and reader, until I found myself not simply observing the speaker’s compassion but absorbing it—as if their tone had opened a space in which I, too, could handle my own memories with a similar softness. Not carefully. There is no brittle tiptoeing around the past as though it might awaken and devour, but rather these lines did something braver: they handed me a pen, looked me in the eye, and asked me to scrawl without flinching. They offered the gentleness that makes boldness possible, the tenderness that makes remembering survivable.
Diana Whitney’s Girl Trouble, is a revival: an uncovering of the tougher emotions many never feel brave enough to voice.