Books
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 as 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
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
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
Girl Trouble
CavanKerry Press, coming April 2026
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
Dark Beds
June Road Press, 2023
PSV NORTH AMERICAN BOOK AWARD, SECOND FINALIST
READ THE LATEST PRESS HERE
“Diana Whitney’s poems are luminous and exacting, skating the line between danger and pleasure, motherhood and desire. Dark Beds is a lush book—of the body and the world—that boldly reckons with the ways we’re inextricably tethered to nature and to each other.”
— Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk
“Dark Beds is a bewitching and enchanting mystical place in what Yeats referred to as ‘the deep heart’s core.’ These poems delineate the lives we plant, grow, and endure through the symphony of the four seasons. From the sexual urgency of spring and the critical overthinking of winter, Whitney’s stunning, beautiful, feminist poems lead us into the magical and sometimes dark natural world, where we find a mirror and metaphor for our wildest, deepest selves, a place where family is the immediate and universal, a way to find solace and strength in a brutal but beautiful world.”
— Elizabeth Powell, author of Atomizer
“The poems in Dark Beds are nearly pyroclastic with ice, lunches for the children, dreams of what might be, and the action of being in the extra/ordinary throes of a meaningfull life—as a mother, a person, a poet, a mind-spirit. This imagistic and incredibly attentive, sensitive, and insightful book maps a maze of how to live and what to do . . . “what if why not what if how come?” These beds (of flowers, of asleep and awake) are of darkness and light, and fertile with matter—the problem (that life ends) and the substance of (living) forever.”
— Matt Hart, author of FAMILIAR
“Whitney’s rich, sensual, formally deft and often erotic poems of transgression and fidelity in realms domestic and beyond remind us that there is always a place in the Zeitgeist for the lyric poem of interiority and beauty. Whether delivering snacks to hungry first-graders and then rushing home to vacuum glow-in-the dark stars from the Berber carpet or swooning over ‘rapture without consequence,’ this is a speaker who turns again and again to the natural world for its lessons of indifference and transformation…”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, NAPBA Final Judge 2024
You Don’t Have to Be Everything
Workman Publishing, 2021
Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound /
Bookshop / Everyone’s Books, VT
Winner of the 2022 Claudia Lewis Award
READ THE LATEST PRESS HERE
“This collection feels like a gift, a pep talk, a shoulder to cry on, and, most of all, a mirror that will captivate its audience.”
- Kirkus Reviews
“Varied and vibrant... the collection pulses with a vital and confident energy, embracing contradictions and complexity.”
- The Boston Globe
“The poems in this gorgeous book glitter like stars, like sequins, like a blade. And they constitute an invitation to our girls to be free — to be whole. How breathtakingly precious that is! How devastatingly rare. I am reminded (again and again) that art is here to save our lives.”
- Catherine Newman, author of How to Be a Person
“What company this book would have provided me if I could have had it when I was young! The poems sing and celebrate, mourn and commiserate, question and assert. The smartly-edited collection displays the tremendous vitality and diversity of women poets today and offers a soulful read for ‘girls becoming themselves’ at any age, even my own.” - Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
"This is such a beautiful gathering of voices, such a beautiful gathering of poems. If I had had this book when I was younger, it would have enriched my life. But I’m so incredibly grateful I get to read it, and be changed by it, now."
- Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights
Wanting It
Harbor Mountain Press, 2014
Order: paperback / e-book
Read selected poems from the collection HERE
WINNER OF THE 2015 RUBERY BOOK AWARD IN POETRY
Praise for Wanting It
“Behind Diana Whitney’s debut collection of poetry Wanting It is a tremulous spirit full of wonder and imaginative agitation. Her poems are ancient secrets that luxuriate as much in the natural world as they do in the ancient sources and songs of her forebears and our wondrous lives as humans who desire and love. Such an abundance of torrential light will be felt long after this book is read.”
– Major Jackson, author of Razzle, Dazzle
“This is a collection full of surprises, visceral and musical, physical and intellectual. Here is a poet in full command of the craft, but writing with such passion that ‘craft’ is the last thing we notice. The leaps and confessions of these speakers offer a thrill ride for the reader, but the sound never falters, and Diana Whitney doesn’t write what’s not worth quoting. Who can do that? This poet can and does. WANTING IT is one of the finest collections I’ve read in a very long time.”– Laura Kasischke, author of Where, Now
“Readers will scarcely miss the erotic element in Diana Whitney’s saucily entitled and brilliant book; but only witless ones will conflate the erotic here with the pornographic, for the author’s lust is so manifestly omni-inclusive. Whitney craves the natural world, in both its benign and malign aspects… but her hungry heart and eye invade her entire universe to such an extent that, if it did not exist, we should have to invent the adjective charged. These poems virtually leap at us from the page. What a debut!”
– Sydney Lea, former Vermont Poet Laureate and author of Here