Girlhood x A Haunting - by Jessica Rae Bergamino (Paperback)

About the Book

Jessica Rae Bergamino's Girlhood x A Haunting follows clues with a magnifying glass through a lyric and devastatingly unique landscape to find the truth about girlhood & trauma.

Book Synopsis

In Jessica Rae Bergamino's full-length poetry book Girlhood x A Haunting, the reader carries Nancy Drew's magnifying glass through a lyrically experimental and visually evocative collection that uncovers the traumas lurking in girlhood.

Bergamino is a master of the persona poem, speaking through the voice of Nancy Drew and letting the mask slip to expose the real speaker who is experiencing and surviving childhood trauma, and the woman who is trying to understand.

In this visually rich collection, artistic representations by cover artist Io Wuerich of personal photographs, and concrete and experimental poetic forms, are utilized to encourage the reader to engage in a deeper investigation of the clues laid down by the speaker.

This book is also about the complex task of interrogating memory. It asks how to make sense of childhood memories and the cultural icons underpinning larger understandings of the past and gender by speaking directly to, through, and about Nancy Drew and other characters in her universe.

This book, winner of Driftwood Press's Editors' Pick Prize, is for fans of Nancy Drew, for those who have experienced trauma, and for lovers of experimental poetry. Girlhood x A Haunting is a reclamation of the self, and of the stories that become linked to identity.

Review Quotes

"Poetry cannot best death. But poetry can make the best of it. 'I need an answer. There are no answers, ' wisely writes Mitchell Untch. This talented poet pens a thesaurus of longing with his first book. His lyrics multiply with the nuances of loss: mainly the speaker's twin from AIDS, but also the loss of a platonic Midwestern girlfriend-I've never read of this kind of unseen love in a more definitive manner.... Editors were 'floored' by these poems. Little wonder. Reader, be floored."

- Spencer Reece, selected by Louise Glück

as winner of the Bakeless Prize, for The Clerks Tale

"The focus of Mitchell Untch's stunning debut collection, Memorial with Liminal Space, pivots on leaving, leaving behind, having left, the undiscovered treasure or detritus. With gorgeous imagery, the poet searches for answers where there are none available-in nurses' stations, carnival booths, bodies of lovers, the past. Even Ronnie and Nancy Reagan, turn away in 1980's AID's pandemic blindness. Too much pain. Too much exquisite pain. As he writes in Better Angels II, No one was listening, and we had become fewer and less, / voices like brooms over sidewalks. If reason needs to find its way, the poems in Memorial with Liminal Space unearth a hidden pathway within. El Dorado. Atlantis. Shangri La. Eden."

- Laurel Ann Bogen, author of The Misread City and

winner of the Academy of American Poets Award

"The gorgeous and moving poems of Mitchell Untch's Memorial with Liminal Space begin by looking back unflinchingly at the suffering and death of his twin brother from the HIV virus. We follow this poet as he laments through the 'corridors of grief.' And as he continues to journey into rooms and scenes from his past, he discovers he can cast a new, prismatic light on those dark moments, turning despair into grace and beauty. Mitchell Untch demonstrates, with his attentiveness to sensual details, how much there is to celebrate and sing: 'the hummingbird's / bright delving, a wakefulness that / cannot be described except that / it lives.'"

- Molly Bendall, author of Watchful