The poems in Brittany Cavallaro's Girl-King are whispered from behind a series of masks, those of victim and aggressor, nineteenth-century madame and reluctant magician's girl, of truck-stop Persephone and frustrated Tudor scholar. This "e;expanse of girls, expanding still"e; chase each other through history, disappearing in an Illinois cornfield only to re-emerge on the dissection table of a Scottish artist-anatomist. But these poems are not just interested in historical narrative: they peer, too, at the past's marginalia, at its "e;blank pages"e; as well as its "e;scrawls and dashes."e; Always, they return to "e;the dark, indelicate question"e; of power and sexuality, of who can rule the "e;city where no one is from."e; These girls search for the connection between "e;alive and will stay that way,"e; between each dying star and the emptiness that can collapse everything.
