Reviews

This is one of my most anticipated releases of this year, so to say that I was excited to get it in my paws early is an understatement. I've been a lover of Campbell's works, particularly her poetry, since I first picked up her pamphlet The Hungry Ghost Festival a few years ago, and I've been eagerly awaiting her first collection.

Caitlin has ghosts on her tongue, seaweed in her bladder and trees in her groin. She is Mary: growing, growing in a Victorian fruit bowl. (from the poem #1).

Girlhood, sexuality, fairy tale, astronomy, nature, science, the freak show, spectatorship, disability/deformity, transformation--these are just a few ingredients that make The Girl Aquarium as rich and textured as it is. Campbell's imagination has no bounds, as it dives into the deepest crevices of ourselves and unearths something that feels secret and private, something that we can't seem to vocalise (I think this may be the reason she chose the Jeanette Winterson quote from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit at the beginning of the book). Campbell does this with ease and honesty, twisting reality into a shape we eerily recognise.

With glass on our lips , we applaud her father's wisdom and ignore her pleading eyes as daylight seeps out from her gums. (from the poem The Magician's Daughter)

All of these poems feel very close to the poet's heart, the best example being possibly my favourite poem Hello, Dark. I admit--I cried reading it. I won't dissect a quote for you here as I want you to read it in its entirety. All I'll say is, it hurt and it was beautiful.

Why not 5 stars? Sometimes, for me, the poems were exceptional but I felt like I was missing something, as though a piece of information that would make imagery Campbell was using clearer wasn't there, and I felt like I wasn't understanding every poem. That's not a negative at all on the writer's part, but, as a reading experience, some of the poems I don't think I could grasp entirely yet, yet being the operative word because I intend to reread this collection over and over again.

This is an absolutely stunning piece. It feels effortless yet you know there's years of practice, craft, and a deep rooted love for poetry behind it, and I think Campbell has so much to say. I'm greedily hoping there's another collection soon...

Favourite Poems:
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
#1
Memories of Your Sister in a Full Body Wetsuit
Appendix
The Girl Aquarium
The Magician's Daughter
Hero
Miss Eliza's Skeleton Factory
The Doll Hospital
The Bear
Netted
A Song of Herself
Hello, Dark
Butterfly Dresses at the Westminster Aquarium (1880)
What the Bearded Lady Told Me
I Heard She Had a Strawberry Heart
Kitchen
The Woman's Private Looking-glass