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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
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Book Review: Girl Torpedo 
​
by Emari DiGiorgio


Girl Torpedo
Emari DiGiorgio
Agape Editions
2018
978-1-939675-62-0
67 pages
$16


Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018) is winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award. DiGiorgio is also author of The Things a Body Might Become (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She's the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She's received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers' Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ. Her work also appears in Rattle, Passages North, What Rough Beast, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Jet Fuel Review, Kettle Blue Review, and others. 
​

Review





















A Review of Emari DiGiorgio's Girl Torpedo by Miguel Soto

Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo is an unapologetic trial of close-quarter relationships, exposing the dynamics between individuals who share a participation of abuse, either through observing, acting, or receiving this verbal or physical treatment. What the reader is left with is an image of trauma unresolved. Although some experiences go unresolved, the confession and transparency offered is an acceptance of vulnerability, opening an avenue towards healing.  
 
In “This Hammer I’ve Inherited,” the symbolic weight of the tool disintegrates with the speaker’s confessional voice, exposing layers within power dynamics, particularly when looking at relationships between abusers and the abused. The speaker detaches any positive connotations the tool may hold as a power symbol:
Heavy tool at my belt,
no good at fixing
a broken canine
or a cavity, treating
cancer, making sure
the water’s clean
The tool’s inability to create or repair points to the user, and it is the user who admits to herself, “always / the girl quick to strike / with my mouth,” leaving the speaker with a symbol of power that only molds fatal consequences. The tool, being an inheritance, reveals how power is a learned trait, but even so, the idea of power hides behind the symbol of the “hammer,” covering the traces of abuse:
I lived
in a ranch house haunted
by a child ghost and
black mold, where
backhands were served
more often than side salads
It is the speaker’s confessional experience that depicts the materialization of the abusive qualities that follow from the speaker:
I can be
cruel and good at wrecking
spirits, have struck down
with judgement, held
a grudge two lifetimes
Intergenerational exchanges of abuse are made clear through the dynamics illustrated in the house, where the speaker receives “backhands,” and rather than sublimating, the speaker reciprocates, responding with “wrecking” and “judgement,” demonstrating the relationship between abusers and the abused. The abused become the abusers, furthering the cycle of violence and trauma: “yelled war instead / of peace.”
 
DiGiorgio’s speaker continues with the conceit of the “hammer,” demonstrating the extension of abuse outside of where it is taught and learned. In moving beyond the “ranch house” image, the speaker crosses a new terrain: “I’ve taken a bridge, / removed the nails, stolen / all the other hammers too,” signifying the removal of power by force. The expectation of fatal consequences already set, leaves this image to follow suit, leaving the speaker with, “smashed finger and thumb.”
 
Much in the way that power can be taken by force, it can also be willingly given: “I gave it / to a long-haired boy with light eyes.” DiGiorgio exposes complex layers that come from the possibilities in relationships as DiGiorgio shifts the reader from familial dynamics to partnerships, and possibly anyone who stands in the way. Ultimately, the power that comes in the form of abuse, which the speaker gives to the “long-haired boy,” is, once again, reciprocated, forcing the speaker to regret her decision: “begged / on my knees to get it back.”
 
In all this turmoil, the speaker leaves the reader with a “survey of the damage,” but with the intention of leaving the reader with hope to hinge on, like the image of someone “[venturing]” into the turmoil to, “pull / tree limbs from car hoods / and shingles impaled / like crooked tombstones.” Except, the person in charge of rebuilding is an ambiguous “someone,” who “[gets] the ladder / and then the work [will] start,” showing that the person in charge of delivering redemption is not the speaker, or another mentioned person(s) who committed the abusive behaviors in earlier lines, but possibly the receiver of the abuse. The point being that abusers are not the ones who dictate when healing begins, or when resolution arrives.
 
Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo is a testament to living and coping with what many people leave unsaid, and it is the speaker(s) in DiGiorgio’s collection of poems who find empowerment in exposing their truths. Exposure acts as an individuals’ response toward individual and community healing, leaving the individuals involved to be subject to outside judgment and critique, but with the intention of questioning and resolving the behaviors and characteristics which perpetuate layers and generations of trauma. Girl Torpedo is, for the reader, an exploration of the imposed silence that often resides within traumatic experiences, not only to fuel understanding, but to fuel action, to fuel the voice lying dormant inside: the voice waiting to rise out of silence into cathartic song.

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Miguel is the Asst. Managing Editor and Book Review Editor for Jet Fuel Review. As an editor, one of his main concerns is giving a space to marginalized voices, centralizing on narratives often ignored. He loves reading radical, unapologetic writers, who explore the emotional and intellectual stresses within political identities and systemic realities. His own writings can be found in OUT / CAST: A Journal of Queer Midwestern Writing and Art, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Rogue Agent. He writes for the Jet Fuel Review blog in Not Your Binary: A QTPOC Reading Column. 
​

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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
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      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
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      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
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      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
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      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
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      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
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      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
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      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
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      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
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      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
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      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
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      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
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      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
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      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022