Girl after Girl after Girl

These poems sing with rapturous speed, offering an Alice-in-Wonderland domestic madness, now spouting recipes, now singing ‘baby, baby, baby’ . . . a chorus of irrepressible girls and mothers rattle loudly in one’s brain and ears long after the reading. The book vibrantly teeters between the personal and historical, between intergenerational melodrama and sheer joy. A thoroughly pleasurable read, indeed, every raucous girl poet must have this book on her poetry shelf! ~Marilyn Chin

To some extent, all poets’ imaginations resemble a magpie’s nest: an assemblage of objects both aesthetically alluring and practically constructive. In the richly detailed and marvelously imaginative Girl after Girl after Girl, Nicole Cooley invites us deep into the magpie nest of one woman’s experience, reminding us that successful motherhood requires a site capable of transitioning from the infant’s cradle to the adolescent’s diving board. Each poem enacts maternity’s central paradox—how to balance the powerful sense of responsibility for the young girls’ lives entrusted to us (‘someone blew out the fragile shell of your daughter’s egg’) with the desire to raise empowered, autonomous women (‘I wish to hold the edges of my miniskirt in my own hands, / to allow whoever I want beneath it’). Walking that fraught edge with this fearless poet-mother is a transformative reading experience. ~Kate Daniels