Girl Trouble

Coming April 7th, 2026 - Books will ship the first week of April
Preorder now!

Girl Trouble is an excavation of female adolescence, a brazen journey through rape culture from the ’80s to #MeToo. Diana Whitney’s earthy poems spill secrets, make trouble, reckon with stories of desire and harm, and explore the agency and oppression of women and girls. Deeply rooted in the natural world, Girl Trouble grieves the planet’s degradation while celebrating queerness and seeking healing for the next generation. By the end, a myriad of voices builds to a full-throated roar and we feel the power and release in truth-telling. This is a book for survivors and advocates, for mothers and daughters, for anyone moving through trauma with resilience.

Diana Whitney is a queer writer and educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of two full-length poetry books, Wanting It and Dark Beds. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other outlets. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana works as a developmental editor and a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.

from Let Me Walk You through It

You were careless, you thought you were invincible. No girl

thinks it will happen to her, the humiliating scooch 
of bare butt to the edge, sock feet in stirrups, the clink of the speculum 

clamped open. On Day One the doctor will insert a toothpick thing
through the pink dimple of the cervix to dilate what has never 

dilated before. Understand the stick has to stay in overnight. Do not 
picture the word perforation. Watch the pod of blue whales 

float across the walls and hold your breath, though they may tell you 
otherwise. On Day Two the nurse will give you four ibuprofens 

ten minutes before. Swallow them gratefully, that’s all you get. 

*****

from Girls Who Had Nothing

They ate 
tons of cereal & drank milk
all the time, the butler recalled.
Shade your eyes from the glare.
Don’t ask how they got there,
some young as 13, young as 11. 

Things happened slowly, said one. 
It was strategic. Like being a frog 
in a pan of water as slowly 
the flame is turned up. One girl,
15, tried to swim to St. Thomas.
Imagine the beating pulse in her ears,
mouthfuls of warm salt water, 
limbs churning toward the far shore 
as parrotfish rasped the reef
below, fire coral forked 
its poison fronds & sharks
cruised the turquoise channel.

Diana Whitney has crafted a book of righteous rage, an anthem against frat boys, a guide to surviving an abortion clinic, and an entire alphabet of victim blaming. Girl Trouble triggers and warns, bears witness, and refuses to look away. With a table of contents that reads with the delicate honesty of whispers exchanged behind closed doors, the relentless litany of this collection captures the threats and harm we face. Whitney knows that when you are a woman in America, the danger will never stop, so it is no mistake that she begins with Thelma and Louise, those symbols of discomfort and extremity in response to the extreme. As women’s faces are wiped off government websites and our hard-won rights shrink before our eyes, Girl Trouble punches back. Readers of every gender, put down whatever you are doing and pick up this unstoppable book.

—Jennifer Militello, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire


“Stop trying to write something beautiful / and write something true.” Diana Whitney’s formally daring and deeply subversive poems trouble what must be troubled, what cannot be left as is, including language itself. Girl Trouble knows, as Muriel Rukeyser did, that a woman telling the truth about her life means “the world would split open.” This book is a woman telling truth after truth, splitting the entire multiverse open. It’s a woman’s celebration of her own sensual experience, it’s a mother’s heartrending and heart-restoring testimony, it’s an axe to patriarchy, it’s a wise and downright fun revision of adolescence, and it’s a love song for the too-often unsung feminist ways of knowing. “I’m not saying I’m a mermaid but I swim with that / grace.”

—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency


It would be easy to call the poems in Girl Trouble fearless, but they are not, nor is the poet who expertly crafted them. Diana Whitney’s smart, dynamic poems about the realities of living in rape culture—from her own childhood and adolescence through to her daughters’—accomplish something far braver. These poems acknowledge the perpetual fear and the constant possibility and aftermath of harm, and they continue onward anyway. Girl Trouble heroically reminds us of where we have been and even begins to imagine a future where, as the poet says, “your body counts too.” 

—Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence


What does it mean for a girl to be in trouble, and what kinds of troubles must girls reckon with? Girlhood and all its glittering power has rarely been explored before with such fury and love in Diana Whitney’s Girl Trouble. From the intimate space of the vanity mirror to the brutality contained within the Virgin Islands, Whitney offers up an unflinching examination of all the spatial, cultural, and physical pressures and violences exerted upon girls and women. “We knew / we had power,” Whitney writes, “but we had to give it up.” And yet, as Girl Trouble proves, the collective power of girlhood can reshape the world. 

—Wendy Chen, author of Their Divine Fires


An unruly, artful growl from the heart, a paean to raising adolescent girls, Diana Whitney’s Girl Trouble is born unto trouble, born to make the good, necessary trouble that confronts and resists the hostility of rape culture. With her “ears pricked & finger on the power,” Whitney offers solace and solidarity to survivors of trauma. Her poems are armed with love and ire, wit and lyric, and the “shiny black / berries of wrath & repair.” This is an angry and beautiful celebration of the bravery of desire. 

—Corwin Ericson, author of Checked Out OK and Swell


Diana Whitney’s poems have a rare and convincing power. There’s true vivacity in her lines, sentences, and phrases, and in her regard for the people she portrays. But there’s something more: Whitney has a genius for rendering the depth and breadth of experience—sexuality and politics, emotion and intellect, humor and seriousness—all in a few exquisitely chosen words. Poems like “Let Me Walk You Through It,” “The Animals,” and “Gemini Moon” enlarge and enliven contemporary poetry. This collection is superb. 

—Peter Campion

April 2026
96 pages
Trade paper – 6 X 9"
$18
ISBN 978-1-960327-19-2
Emerging Voices