Isabella Correa’s collection of poetry, Good Girl and Other Yearnings, carefully draws upon popular music and rhyme to interrogate the meaning of what it is to be a woman and a worker in the digital age. At the same time, sonorous lines and uncanny imagery explore tragedies of family relations.

For example, in my favorite poem of the collection, “interview with a dead girl,” the spiritual intersects with the mundane, as the speaker’s hair turns into a halo in the first stanza (“hair spooling into haloes”). Before work, eggs boil at breakfast in the next stanza, which have been overcooked as they “pop,” and a “sting of oil, that sustenance of speckled heat,” anoints the speaker’s arm. These two stanzas, a dialogue between daily disruption and the holy, angel into desire as a lover “chose me, / a winning scratch-off ticket,” in the final stanza. Of course, the ticket evokes the cheap, liminal space of a gas station, and a dispensable love that can be scratched-off. Fulfillment is deferred as it confronts an endless chain of scratch-offs at the gas station. The subject is torn apart, in the end, tying the failure of desire to materialize in love to the title of the poem, since the speaker seems to both be dead inside and alive with a commodified desire.

In the next piece, “Splits,” the speaker physically performs a split, a clear inversion of the spiritual rending in “Interview with a Dead Girl.” As an attestation to Correa’s keen organization, the subject in the poems spiritually and physically rents side-by-side, a 21st century passion of the artist, invoking stigmata in the blinding lights of the highway and gas stations.

In other parts of the collection, the speaker walks a tightrope between family relationships, natural beauty, work, and the cheapness of post-industrial life. For example, the speaker confronts herself  as a “serious person” with a “heart braided like a rope” that can bear her burdens. Consider how humans have to construct themselves into serious people through work and daily life, maintaining a self-discipline to generate profit. Again, the subject splits between the harsh clock of work and the freedom of poetry. The poet summons the “tick of time,” a subtle but precise image that denotes the organization of time along commercial lines while connoting a blood-sucking insect. The tick of the clock battens on the time of the speaker, converting artistic life-blood into work. Yet, the product of this work can only barter for the unfulfilling suburban fantasy signified in the white fence post that actually limits the reality of the speaker.

Correa’s poetry in context engages the triumph of market authoritarianism across the world, in place of any constraint upon the exploitation of human labor. The post-cold war generation of U.S. poets grew up in a society far removed from the New Deal and organized labor, once guardrails against the systemic inequalities of industrial society and their radical resolutions. Now is the poetry inured to financial crises, the unfettered U.S. occupation of the world, and the failure of the world system to confront the Covid Pandemic. Poets from every corner of the world thus tap into expressions of class struggle against exploitation as the sap of freedom and creative expression. Such expressions are clear in Correa’s poetry, which has provoked a reaction amongst peers, friends, and other poets. Her poem, “I wrote this poem on company time,” must be noted for its use of Excel Spreadsheet and its invocation of popular anti-work rhymes. As such, it is a clever play on form, while, from a legal perspective, it inverts the commodity form into poetry. Correa re-appropriates the labor time that she sells for wages into the restored dignity of creative work. Correa’s work tethers to the cage of market technology but liberates itself as poetry.

That said, the poetry has bold turns that might induce vertigo in the traditional critic. Those poets on the edge of innovation thus owe Correa since she is loosening the creative necktie that many critics would like to fasten to contemporary poets. Luckily, poetry reflects and refracts across flows of language, channeling infinite difference and sameness, summoning social and linguistic reality in alien forms. Correa’s use of popular songs and labor rhymes generates internal and external friction between discourses in a unique style, hammered out of the working class experience in the digital age. For that, it is worth a read.

The use of popular imagery and metaphor also invokes the manner in which Billy Collins appropriated metaphors from everyday American life and pressed them to strange conclusions. Correa similarly flips popular images onto their heads.

There arises poetry in the form of the commodity that allows its readers to comprehend reality one-dimensional, as a cheap market performance that does not disrupt the consumers orientation in society in a meaningful fashion. One way that a poet can respond is by taking those one dimensional representations and turning them inside out, defamiliarizing them, or inflating them into their every-multiplying dimensions. Correa does some of this, especially defamiliarizing the cheapness of digital life in her work.

The poems touch on a diverse array of topics such that tragedy is “multiple and relentless” (AR Ammons). Thus, the work requires a few reads to sumptuously disentangle.

– Andrew Hanson