If it weren’t for the title of her debut full-length collection, Good Girl and Other Yearnings (Write Bloody Publishing, April 2025), one would never guess Isabelle Correa possessed any aspiration to conform. These poems defy prescriptive convention at every turn, often trading the fourth wall and tidy definitions for the expanse and intrigue of the gray area. The work is ferociously political without direct mention of the law or its makers. It explores deep questions of identity through descriptions of experience, treating anything and everything as a tool to serve its message.
The book is a welcome return to postmodern ideals, with a tasteful 21st century facelift. In a 1999 interview with the Poetry Society of America, Diane Wakoski once stated, “American poetry, like American painting, is always personal, with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually, claiming one’s right to be different and often to break taboos.” Wakoski went on to say that she believed the 21st century would be a time of imitation, paling in the shadow of the Golden Age of Poetry. If she gets the chance to read this collection, she might change her mind about that. Despite being a twice-over expat, Correa epitomizes Wakoski’s vision of the true American poet.
Correa’s use of common language and conversational tone is a callback to forbears like Whitman and O’Hara, who get their own shoutouts in the book via titles such as “When I Don’t Sing the Body Electric,” “Meditations in A Solar Eclipse,” and “Meditations in a Lunar Eclipse”. While the influence of the 20th century is clearly felt, Correa expands on their notes to create a distinctive contemporary voice, and her own world set inside of the one we think we know.
In place of a roadmap, Good Girl and Other Yearnings is intricately laced with uniquely framed common images and experiences, such as in ”Underwater Tea Party”:
My sister a cross-legged anchor
on the blue bottom of the blue pool.
Her hair an atmosphere,
her cheeks a puffed planet.
Pinkies up. Can you guess
what I’m saying?
In addition, the poet utilizes a wide array of both popular and niche cultural references to intimate a sense of time and place. The function is two-fold, as these choices also result in the text having a deeply personal and nostalgic resonance for Gen X and millennials alike. Poems such as “Moby Dick as All My Rage” showcase the pervasive influence of the classics, while “Modern Girl with CPTSD Watches Barry, Season 2 Finale” plops the work down on the couch next to the reader. The author juxtaposes commonplace events and self-deprecation with home-run swings at life’s biggest questions, simultaneously exposing the universal in the mundane and the mundanity of self-important pondering.
The informal gut punch is a trend that builds and carries as the book continues. Correa often addresses the reader directly, as well as using self-talk, wandering thought, and confession to enhance the sense of connection to the speaker. Bringing the audience this close ends up giving the author some breathing room – when language is elevated or an allusion is a hair out of reach, it reads as an invitation instead of a closed door. By mixing scrabble-winning diction with frank vulnerability, Correa bridges the gap between the Instagram poet and the academic.
The author continues to assert her right to self-determination in the structure of the work itself. The book is divided into five untitled sections, each opening with a quote that sets the mood while evading narrow constriction of the contents. The format takes the reader on a journey that leaps in and out of time, yet manages to feel intuitively cohesive, like a thought process or word association game. Within the text, Correa is bravely experimental, treating form as a palette to pick and choose from. Pieces range widely, from long-sentenced prose poems like “The Key Inside the Frog”, to the doubly broken lines in “Interview With a Dead Girl”:
Of course I didn’t want death / cold bones folded
and forgotten in the earth / my hair spooling halos
on a silk pillow until each strand turned to dust / but
even more / I wanted to be defined
by anything/ but those that hurt me.
Narrative is loaded throughout. Titles serve as introductory lines, punch lines, and their own microcosm. Punctuation is a privilege that not every poem is awarded. Even the theme is manipulated, flexing with the light and the angle of view.
At first glance, the book and the poems in it appear to present themselves as a plea – for answers, definition, or forgiveness – posed to the universe, to a lowercase god, and to you. Take for instance, the final lines of the opening poem, “Invocation”:
…Hands empty,
I’m asking you for no small thing—
give me meaning in the shape of this loneliness,
make the world a mirror, make me beautiful.
However, a closer read rapidly unravels that theory. Correa cleverly employs enjambment and double entendre throughout to reveal and elucidate a morbid curiosity and taboo fixation with the other side of the “good girl” coin. Death is at the forefront, and the tug-of-war between desire and fear is relentlessly on display. By the final section, it becomes evident that the deepest of the “other yearnings” and the solution for it are one in the same – acceptance of what is:
...I am small
as in understood. I no longer worry
I am unlovable. Finally, undefined,
in an ocean vast enough to hold me, I float.
When taken in its totality, Good Girl and Other Yearnings is not a request to be or be seen as good, but a thorough and often scathing examination of what goodness is in the first place. It is a stream-of-consciousness portrait of disillusionment, a rejection of shame, and an offer to examine our collective values. It poses the questions – who decides what is good, and why are we listening to them? This defiant reclamation of identity and evidence-based case for liberation on every scale is a win for American poetics, worthy of a place in the spotlight alongside its predecessors.