Girling - by Eve Esfandiari-Denney (Paperback)

About the Book

An astonishing debut that contends with mortality, lineage and girlhood.

Book Synopsis

In Girling, her open-hearted debut collection, Eve Esfandiari-Denney wrestles with the boundaries between living and death, history and the present, and how these are preordained for us in the fabric of our DNA and in our geographical or cultural environments. Through a personal relationship with illness and a closeness to death, the author asks the reader, 'I hope it's ok to die. I can / be something / like actualized metaphor.' She recounts the story of a father left abandoned in a church, and remembers a grandmother's home in a traveller's caravan. Grief is portrayed with a tongue in cheek, cosmic register, as the speaker invests in 'lions' mane', attempts to feel 'super-radiant', and moves into 'moon pose', while we watch electronic deep-sea claws on YouTube, and google what to do if your mum died last night. Philosophical, funny, pertinent, ecological, global and intimate, this is a collection of poems for the contemporary moment, a book deeply personal yet communal in its intention, beginning from a personal history then resonating outwards, ending on a note so gorgeously hopeful, as 'life' moves towards the speaker, 'gloriously close'.

Review Quotes

'Before theme and subject, there is the pure, iridescent beauty of Esfandiari-Denney's sentences; a singular voice that is alluring and sensuous, pleasurable to follow to whichever subject the poet chooses. The subjects are girlhood-cum-womanhood, the line between debilitating illness and delusional wellness.... The magic of this collection is that it is never highfalutin, finding a way to make an ending like "DJ are you listening did you read to the end will you blow my voice a kiss" powerfully funny and moving.'
-- Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Guardian

'Girling, the verb, encompasses experiences from the banal to the transformative - and those that are both - producing an effect of both satire and poignancy.... The collection moves between the grotesque and the sentimental to paint stories that prove to us that angst is not an adolescent but a timeless feeling. Esfandiari-Denney writes beautifully, alarmingly, and at times, grossly. Readers could pick a page at random and be sucked in by the way she moves between interrogating a world of words, sounds, and light.'
-- Maria Farsoon, The Skinny

'Eve Esfandiari-Denney brilliantly reconstructs the feeling and language of personhood at its precarious, mortal edges. Transcendental, humane, cool and extraterrestrial, slant-smart and errantly metaphysical, Girling explores the de-familiar world, woozy from the fumes of its crash landing. This is the most enigmatic debut I have read in a decade, and it won't rest on my shelf for another, at least'
-- Jack Underwood, author of A Year in the New Life

'In her astounding debut, Eve Esfandiari-Denney reports on the gerunds of a girl's life: working, talking, listening, flowering, looking, seeing, pretending, embodying, doubling, selling yourself, losing yourself, "literally flowing through the solar system," witnessing, shining, "holding the possibility for being prolonged, continued and remade," levitating, swirling, healing, losing, opening, breathing in, breathing out, translating, yearning, crushing, dying. The speaker, a wise but humble narrator, charming and willing, takes us along as she "piece[s] together the delicate parts of what I am." Pop culture references are deployed with power and she plays with philosophical questions like they are toys. Girling absolutely stopped me in my tracks. You lean in to get the full story and all of sudden you've been brought to your knees. Only a girl would write, of the cancer devastating her family, that, "the disease is just / trying to survive, / too." Girling is a biodome for girls who think too hard. "I thought I'd discover transcendental things, but inside me was a tanning salon." Yes, girl, same. Put it on my tombstone.'
-- Sasha Debevec-McKenney, author of Joy is my Middle Name

'Girling glides through death, pain, surprise and survival to arrive at the most gorgeous and hopeful principle for living. The sensation of not-knowing, or of being suspended in-between, becomes an opportunity to be more permeable, more open to the synchronicities and oddities of the world. This collection is mesmeric, elemental, luminous, but time spent with Eve's writing also feels like the most intimate and generative conversations, the moments between friends that can alter the day's shape.'
-- Brodie Crellin, author of A Sense of Occasion

About the Author

Eve Esfandiari-Denney's debut poetry pamphlet, My Bodies This Morning This Evening, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2022. She has been shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize, Aesthetica's Creative Writing Award, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Granta, BBC Radio 4 and Prototypes Annual Anthology, among others. Girling is her first collection.