To read Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski is to step into a landscape of jagged edges and unraveling seams, where the boundaries between self and survival blur. This collection is a meditation on the violences that shape gender—how femininity is sculpted by expectation, how desire is tangled with harm, how to live inside a body constantly made into an object. Lisowski writes with a lyricism that is both splintered and searing, each line cut with a precision that makes the fragmentation itself feel intentional, necessary. This is poetry that refuses neat resolutions, demanding instead that we sit with its hauntings, its echoes, its wreckage.

At the heart of Girl Work is an interrogation of labor—the labor of girlhood, of desirability, of making oneself into something men want, even (especially) when it erases the self in the process. The collection pulses with the understanding that to be seen as beautiful is often to be consumed. “To be beautiful: to survive,” Lisowski writes, but survival here is not safety; it is a negotiation, a question without an answer. The poems reckon with sexual violence and men’s presumed access to feminized bodies, tracing the ways in which harm becomes inheritance, how girlhood is a performance of fear learned early and worn forever.

Lisowski invokes The Ring, the 2002 horror film, as a recurring motif—Samara Morgan, abandoned at the bottom of a well, becomes a spectral mirror for the speaker. The fear isn’t just of becoming her, but of realizing that all girls might already be her, trapped in cycles of harm they never consented to. The horror here is not cinematic but structural, embedded in the fabric of gender itself.

Among the standout pieces, “Crazy4Crazy, or Pharmacological Solutions for Personal Problems” lingers long after reading. A meditation on T4T love, psychiatric institutionalization, and the limits of care under capitalism, the poem underscores one of the collection’s central tensions: what does it mean to care for others when access to care is itself a privilege? Girl Work does not offer easy answers, but it does offer a space to sit with the complexity.

This is a book that resists closure, one that leaves you a little raw, a little undone. Lisowski’s voice is urgent, interrogative, and unflinching—each poem reaching outward, demanding to be heard, to be reckoned with.

📖 Read this if you love: haunting, fragmented poetry that interrogates gender, labor, and survival; pro-survivor narratives that resist easy redemption; and works by Andrea Long Chu and Franny Choi.

🔑 Key Themes: Gendered Violence and Survival, The Commodification of the Body, Haunting and Memory, Beauty as a Construct, Solidarity and Care Under Capitalism.