July 14, 2026
ISBN 9798234043887 / Paperback / 36 pages

Formally rigorous and deeply erotic, Good Girl is a hybrid chapbook of lyric essays, poems, and fragments moving through grammar and girlhood, desire and discipline, obedience and rebellion. It traces the bruises that approval leaves on a voice and the power that is reclaimed when that voice decides to misbehave.

“Holly Coleman gives good word. Melodiously naughty, Good Girl gets off breaking its own taboos of form and decorum. Verse and prose romp in verbal roleplay. Sensual arousals (à la Keats) stroke and choke-out deeper meanings. There’s even a kink-maxxed manifesto-ette—‘The Erotics of Grammar’—where Beauty submits to Order. Holly Coleman opens oracular portals of word and desire.”

— Jack Skelley, author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e))

“Quietly transgressive, delicate, punk: Holly Coleman’s poems are lyrical notes passed under the table, nosegays spiked with thorns. Marx said, and the Romantics believed, that the senses were historians. Here is writing from a twilit present reaching backwards to a past that was never that far away. These are poems for seduction, for sorrow, for loneliness, for being too smart for your own good. A marvel.”

— Anahid Nersessian, author of Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of Chicago Press)

“‘It’s a small distance between saying something and saying it well.’ Poet and essayist Holly Coleman achieves the latter with the muscularity of her foremothers. In Good Girl, Coleman misbehaves syntactically as an act of embodied care against caustic hypervigilance. In one fist, she holds the bruise of language, and with the other, she rattles the ribcage to recast the dark plume of girlhood into another red-hot possibility.

Coleman wants more, and she takes it. In turn, she draws a changeling shape, a spiral or a spinal column, in which we might receive more fully. She sings a chewy incantation: her phrasing beckons, cranes the neck, asks us to look back, lick the sentence’s residue a bit longer. She dangles us there. Asks us to spit on it. We do. We pupate into something thirsty, fresh-tongued, open-throated, and down bad with our own sacred badness.”

— K. D. Sims, author of I Cut My Nails for You (Discount Guillotine)

Holly Coleman teaches at the University of North Florida and is a Ph.D. student in British Romanticism and rhetorical theory at Old Dominion University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Passages North, The Whitney Review of New Writing, Dream Boy Book Club, On The Rag, and elsewhere. Good Girl is her debut chapbook.

Cover photograph copyright © 2018 by Therese Öhrvall.