Poetry by Zefyr Lisowski, reviewed by Adrie Rose
GIRL WORK (Noemi Press)

When I first saw the title Girl Work, it brought to mind ideas of emotional labor, domestic work so often not seen as actual work, and also, the exhortation “girl, work.” Zefyr Lisowski’s Girl Work tangles its sharp fingernails in all of these ideas of work and so much more—body horror, the jumbles and fragments of traumatic memory, sex work, transness, and the ways a person can be haunted and exploited by all of these.  

Girl Work brings readers into these experiences through hybrid pieces and prose poems, including many that literally break apart on the page, enacting the breakdown and rupturing of memory and self through trauma. One such poem is “Girl Work (He called me),” where not only does the page appear to have been cut apart and put back together with overlapping and misaligned segments, but even the words have begun to break down: “He w / as polite” and “He moved his wealt / h (the girl, the dollar) around.”

Girl Work refuses to allow beauty and work to be either simply good or simply evil. It also refuses to allow the speaker or us as readers off the hook for the gender, class, and sexual violence that permeate these pages. The speaker of these poems is not flat, not only a haunted or hapless victim or a shellacked pinup. She both is and is not trapped at the bottom of the well. Many of these contradictions are visible in “Girl Work,” when the speaker at age 21 begins to remember sexual violations and is so overwhelmed by them she stops speaking and eating, binge drinks, and then hits her girlfriend: “When I hit her my mouth popped in a sad oh! of surprise and I started crying and she did too.” The first line of this poem—“And this is what I say to you. A girl is a kind of work”—makes explicit that remembering is work, being a receiver of violence of work, watching yourself replicate that violence is work, and, finally, showing all of that to the reader is work.

“I’ve made my beauty. It suppresses / everything that’s not my beauty,” the speaker says in the central long poem “Poem Only About Beauty.” But in the same poem, the speaker also says, “I do not wish to be beautiful, but it has been done to me anyway. / In the end, there’s only work.” This central poem uses a series of short scenes and striking images to explore beauty as performance: The lights of the cafe where the speaker works clicking off; the webcam for sex work turning on; the purchase of “a better vibrator” or “a Fenty stick”; the names of famous blonde actresses the speaker gets compared to. It all works together to illustrate that beauty is both about consuming and being consumed. 

Girl Work is always about gendered violence and always about capitalism and exploitation. There is no beauty without these; yet beauty is still something the speaker wants. Or has to want. “Pure. Good. Whatever,” the speaker says in “Poem Only About Beauty,” and “To be beautiful: to survive.”

In the very next poem, also titled “Poem Only About Beauty,” the text piles up and overlaps on itself, with some of the lines turned or spun in different directions, as the speaker and her circumstances spin in multiple directions. It’s as if the labor of laying out all of the scenes and information in the previous long poem has overloaded the system, and the mind is now spinning and exploding onto the page in its efforts to keep making this work, and its relentless repetitions, visible:

Girl Work is also the work of remembering as well as the messy contradictions that go along with that. Consider the very first lines of the collection, from the poem “After I Become Well, I Throw Myself into the Well Hole”:

I spent years not remembering and once I did it was a riverbed.

It was a flood. It was highwater jeans.

I spent years trying to become a little saintly girl and threw my cell phone into the French Broad River.

Threw my cell phone down the well. Threw my throw-up in my hair.

Are you listening?

For a decade I devoted myself only to beauty. I worked at it, made a poem about my beauty.

Made many.

What can we do with the beauty that’s done unto us.

In case we had any doubts, later in the collection we find the poem “Remembering is a Kind of Work Too,” which ends with the lines: “Even after I got out, even after, / it followed.” 

Repeated images and references haunt this collection, haunting the reader as the speaker herself has been haunted. “Girl Work” (page 55) begins simply but wrenchingly:  “And it happens again. And it happens again. And it / happens again. He was six and I was four. And it happens again.” The poem keeps going until its text becomes overwritten by itself—memory piling onto memory. 

We as readers are constantly being implicated in these poems, often with the refrain “Do you know what you did.” The poem “Poem with Dead Girl in It” has these instructions along the bottom, instructions that turn into accusation: “To be read twice—once normally, once tilting down the page and squinting as in a Magic Eye®. Are you listening. Do you even know what you did.” The poem itself is missing parts of lines, with blank gaps on the page as well as gaps in the logic and syntax of the lines, forcing the reader to engage more deeply with the text, struggle for connections, leap the gaps, and make meaning from the pieces that appear. It’s yet another mimetic for the speaker’s experiences.

From the very start of the collection to the end, Zisowski conjures the well (and the dead girl at the bottom of the well) from the horror film The Ring. Pop culture references, including The Ring, Henry Darger’s paintings, and the music of Ke$ha, not only situate Girl Work in a specific cultural and temporal context, they also refute the notion that these are types of art (or, dare I say, beauty) which are unworthy of being inside the poem’s gaze. They also reinforce the collection’s insistence on what can be considered work and what that work is worth.

Transness, and girl-ness as a trans girl, is omni-present in these poems. Sometimes it’s explicit, as when the speaker says, “We were both transsexuals. / We were both women deemed ‘crazy.’” Girl Work unflinchingly explores trans life expectancy, the intersections with race and class, and how the deaths of trans folx are treated (read: ignored) by the media and public. 

Girl Work drenches us in topics that Americans most want—and don’t want—to talk about: sex, labor, transness, trauma, and the exploitation of all of these. Lisowski takes readers down into the well of memories but doesn’t leave us there to drown. She takes readers into the messy, fragmented experiences of what it means to be a “girl with a penis,” to be beautiful, to have that beauty be both work and danger, to be implicated by beauty and complicit in violence, and to claim agency amidst all of this.

Adrie Rose lives next to an orchard in western MA and is the editor of Nine Syllables Press. Her work has previously appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, The Baltimore Review, Ploughshares blog, and more. Her chapbook I Will Write a Love Poem was published in 2023 by Porkbelly Press, and her chapbook Rupture was published in 2024 by Gold Line Press. She was a finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2021, named a Highly Commended Poet for the International Gingko Prize in 2023, and won the 2023 Radar Coniston Prize. She won the Anne Bradstreet Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 2022. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College.