The Satisfactory Nothing of Girls by Emily Bowles

“Emily Bowles has taken the Virginia Woolf we know and unbound her. The Virginia who walks these pages is edged with mist, a ghost that goes on changing and living in ethereal verse. From mermaids to madness, from blooms to bodies, Bowles traverses the landscape of the delicate and the dark. We should all be so lucky to make such a journey.”

–Holly Lyn Walrath, author of The Smallest of Bones

The Satisfactory Nothing of Girls is a clever entwining of two women living more than a century apart. Bowles “develops strange affection” for Miss Rachel Vinrace in Virginia Woolf’s 1915 book, The Voyage Out. The sheltered life of Rachel, confined to “a ship in the Amazon,” is parallel to Bowles’ “sheltering in” during COVID19 awaiting a “shipment from Amazon.” This collection of word-play poetry compares their “satisfactory and unsatisfactory nothings.” Women coming of age/aging, body image, fitting in, how women are treated, and the drain of “shut-in-ess” are revealed within Covid19 confines, linked back to Woolf’s book. Bowles muses as Emily Dickinson’s reflection meets Nicole Kidman’s nose; “Roomsical Women” fold “into the absence of self from life”, and “Prismprisons” playfully passes time.” Her double entendre, contrasts, and turn of words all make for an interesting read.

–Annette Langlois Grunseth, author of Becoming Trans-Parent: One Family’s Journey of Gender Transition

“Emily Bowles gazes out a lonely Covid window while hearing—and at times becoming—women writers from centuries ago, including Virginia Woolf who said the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time, it expands later. Oh, that she had met Emily’s untamed anxiety while shut-in, her ‘beginending’ when she uses inventive language on a modern mythical, mystical voyage with flowers, nose jobs, and mermaids, where there is not ‘a ship on the Amazon’ but a ‘shipment from Amazon’. Travel the landscape of Emily’s wry consciousness—‘She flatters him / He flattens her’—as she untangles desire, the ongoing struggle of the collective feminine self knit together by Emily with erudition and wit. Whether ‘violence at midlife’ or ‘violets at midlife’, she gets the answer right by writing an answer for all women because ‘that’s the story of hers most mine’.”

–Kathryn Gahl, author of The Velocity of Love