Girl gives long-fingered self-portrait has known many different and smaller lives before. I first began putting together this chapbook four years ago; in it’s earliest draft this chapbook was a collection of sonnets which I called In Gioventù (in youth). Written mostly during my honours creative writing workshop, after graduation I recognized that I couldn’t keep up the slightly tortured momentum those early sonnets required of me.
Here’s a poem from that first sonnet collection originally published by Montreal Writes
“Somebody Else” by The 1975: Up Next
Midnight
city, chocolate lit, hopeless romantic,
Borderline July, the sound of night
mistakes.
Settle down. We met alone, Paris. He’s American.
Sucked the blood out my gums for
dinner.
Electric feel. Chlorine. I came out
for a good cry.
Cradled his tongue behind my ear for
sex. He said
Give yourself a try Cinnamon Girl.
Sit next to me.
Kept rubbing me down with that metal
handle.
Destroying my bed peace with good
morning.
Before he left, took the
neighbourhood robbers
For a run around my Daddy issues.
Pumped up strangers slow dance, don’t worry.
He’s danger. He’s reckless. He’s restless.
Sincerity is scary but he felt like
home.
As a whole, these poems were boldly lustful and adventurous escapades of another life, and while the voice of those poems no longer felt authentic there is no denying that bits and pieces of that ‘girl’ from the sonnets kept calling me back.
Fast forward a few years, I joined a writing group hosted by the talented Sarah Burgoyne. As a group we met every Tuesday for two months with the unified goal of writing a chapbook. While I had little hope that I’d successfully complete this project I started 3 and a half years ago, I knew that I owed it to myself enough to invest time in my poetry — something that grad school was slowly stealing from me. While I didn’t entirely know how I wanted this chapbook to end, I knew where I wanted it to start: with the ever elusive “I”.
To those of you who know me personally, you’ll notice the cameos in this collection: the names of family members, my favourite bar, anecdotes of good times past, hobbies, street names, regrets, traditions and more.
Although it would be dishonest to admit that I am the “I” in Girl, I can confess that she is at once an exaggeration and oversimplification of myself— a warped mirror of my best and worst qualities, my greatest loves and anxieties. In many ways, I like to think of Girl as a mosaic of the best lines I’ve written since 2017, though until I was halfway through that’s all it really was. That is, until the narrator began to recognize herself as a part of another. As the author, I realized how crucial a commitment to fleshing out a matrilineal line was to Girl— how the women before her are a part of the “I” she can no longer ignore. When I started to write about motherhood as part of the self, these poems revealed to me how simple words like “selfish,” “arrhythmia,” and “daughter” could carry tremendous weight. Written to read effortlessly as a confessional, finding authenticity in the narration of Girl was largely an adventure in maturity.
As a final homage to the years of unpublished work that influenced, but never made it’s way into Girl, the title Gives long-fingered self-portrait is a riff on an old verse of poetry I wrote many years ago:
the neighbouring branches press up
against the house
long-fingered tip-toeing around the
swollen glass
While the narrator of this chapbook might begin by tiptoeing around herself, by the end of the collection she takes back the body and becomes the house.
Sophia Magliocca is a Master’s student in English Literature at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal) where she researches the effects of (mis)interpreting how women's legacies are documented across literary history. Sophia is a known lover of travel, pasta and orange cats. Most recently she has published poetry in Canadian literary journals such as Yolk, Montreal Writes and periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. In 2023 Sophia published her debut chapbook Girl gives long-fingered self-portrait with above/ground press. Find her on Instagram @sophmagli