Rochelle Hurt and The J Girls

Rochelle Hurt and The J Girls


Congratulations to Rochelle Hurt for her new poetry collection, The J Girls: A Reality Show, published by Indiana University Press. Meet Jocelyn, Jodie, Jennifer, Jacqui, and Joelle as they navigate growing up in the late 1990s. In this hybrid blend of poetry, screenplay, and drama, episodes capture moments of the girls’ adolescence, following them through every bad decision, poetic monologue, and campy performance where every girl experiments with who they are on and off screen.

Fierce, fresh, and playful, this book is something we’ve all been waiting for. From the descriptions of the Cast List to the End Credits featuring the “Beatitudes for Meek Girls,” the entire collection is a wild, candid ride through the highlights and critiques surrounding teenage life. The themes, much like the friendships within, transcend across every generation, unleashing the universality of self-discovery and the importance of creating a better world for girls.

Like the teenagers at its center, Rochelle Hurt’s The J Girls: A Reality Show is wild, smart, aching, and fearless. This genre-exploding book exquisitely captures the thrumming ecstasy and terror and guilt and bravado and tenderness and rage of adolescent girlhood. The J Girls understand that no girl is ever only one girl, and they claim themselves, in all of their iterations, again and again. This book is the bite-and-glitter I wish I’d had as a companion during my own high school years; I’m so grateful to have it now.

Catherine Pierce, author of Danger Days

The J Girls is available now from Indiana University Press, Bookshop, and Amazon.

We’re also very excited to share an interview that dives deeper into the collection and Rochelle’s inspirations and writing process behind it. This interview was conducted via email by our Blog Editor, Taylor Dilger.


Taylor Dilger: Could you describe some of your inspirations for this collection?

Rochelle Hurt: This book is a reflection of my own adolescence that is both fictionalized and deeply personal. It was heavily influenced by my own girlhood: the rust belt, Catholic school, church festivals, the wet n wild makeup section at Rite-Aid, girls’ bathrooms, single parents, Avon, hot dogs, belly-button rings, skunk highlights, Salt-N-Pepa, The Craft, But I’m a Cheerleader, Survivor, MTV, Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, the Spice Girls, and PJ Harvey–as processed through some later influences: Reality Hunger, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Lana Del Rey, Baroque paintings, the Gurlesque, burlesque, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Dolly Parton, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Harryette Mullen, Judith Butler, and just feeling out of place in academia. I wanted to write all the delicious trashy things that sophisticated culture tells me to hide.

TD: You combine poetry, screenplay, and drama together in a unique hybrid blend. Could you tell me more about this choice and why you decided to fit this piece in this particular form? 

RH: While I was writing this book, I was also studying in a Ph.D. program and reading a lot of gender and queer theory on performance as a means of subversion. In a dramatic performance, one can control her own image and manipulate the audience’s gaze, sometimes by parodying the stereotypes that have been placed on her and exposing the scripts she’s been given as bogus. I knew that performance and camp had to be a part of these poems, so I thought about the ways that teen girls perform their identities in groups in order to understand and empower themselves. In the late 90s, when this book is set, reality TV was really taking off, and the ways in which reality so often seems “scripted” came into focus–the roles we’re supposed to play based on gender, class, race, sexuality. It was a toxic culture in many ways, and direct critique was just not available to many young women. So I wanted to give the teens in this book another way to process, perform, and parody their own reality as working-class girls while still allowing them to have fun and gain some agency.

TD: In “The Birth of Anger at the Roller-Skating Rink” you write, “Even my first kiss came / like an accidental slap from a strange man, who, / on his way across this very room to the arcade / or concession stand, tripped over me like a dropped / candy box and decided he wanted a piece, so took it.” Many of these poems cover women’s sexuality and identity. Could you elaborate on the importance of talking about these topics in our society today? 

RH: Writing about the lives of women and girls is a form of resistance for me. American culture remains toxic in many ways, and while attitudes toward sexuality and women’s bodies have improved, we still see direct assaults on reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights in our political system, which is deeply racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and classist. We still live in a culture that objectifies and sexualizes women and girls while demonizing them for expressing their sexualities–particularly if they are working-class or women of color. We live in a culture that punishes women seeking abortions but gives second chances to rapists if they’re white and educated. I live in a state (Florida) that is currently trying to ban abortion after 15 weeks and to ban discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools. They have already banned trans girls from playing sports in school. We haven’t made nearly enough progress in the last 50 years, and now it seems we may be going backward politically. Somebody once told me my poems were full of rage, and they were right. 

Rochelle has four poems featured in Issue 11 and five poems Issue 25 in collaboration with Carol Guess. You can also check out her website, Twitter, and Instagram for more.

Contributor Update: Rochelle Hurt

Rochelle HurtToday we are pleased to share news about past contributor Rochelle Hurt. Rochelle’s essay “An Entrance, an Exit, an Entrance” has been included in The Orison Anthology, vol. 2. The anthology is available for purchase from Orison Books’ website.

Four poems by Rochelle Hurt can be read in Issue 11 of Superstition Review.

Congratulations, Rochelle!

Contributor Update, Rochelle Hurt: Second Book of Poetry

Rochelle Hurt’s recently published second collection of poetry, In Which I Play the Runway, has won the 2015 Barrow Street Book Prize. Richard Blanco, who selected her book for the prize, describes that her “words [are] spoken with a vigor and honesty that are felt in the gut; words that remain lodged in the back of the throat.”

To pre-order her new book, click here.

To read her poetry that was published in Issue 11 of our magazine, click here.

You can also read samples of her poetry on her website.

Contributor Book News: Rochelle Hurt

We at Superstition Review are proud to share the news of poet Rochelle Hurt’s new book!

The Rusted CitySelected as the eighteenth volume in the Marie Alexander Poetry Series at White Pine Press, The Rusted City is a hybrid collection of prose poetry and verse that reads like a novel in poems. Told through the experiences of “the smallest sister,” it is a coming-of-age fable set in the haunting dreamscape of the Rust Belt, where industrial corrosion becomes a funhouse mirror of personal loss. Poems from The Rusted City have been published in the Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Versal, Superstition Review, New Delta Review, and elsewhere

Attend Rusted City events and readings: check here for updates. Add The Rusted City on Goodreads!

Excerpts:

From A History of the Rusted City in Superstition Review

Individual prose poems in The Prose Poem Project and The Portland Review

Praise for The Rusted City:  

“In Hurt’s sparkling debut, the tinny, melancholic, gorgeous stir of Baudelaire’s heartbroken metropolis is heard again, but this time its flesh and spirit are rusted.  Its lung is rusted, its heart and belly are rusted.  Its mother, father, and sister are all rusted.  In this city, though, rust is no death rattle but the life rustle.  In this city, the prose poem scrapes the sky until rusted clouds burst, sending rusted beauty clattering down.  Hurt brings the prose poem back to life.”
—Sabrina Orah Mark

“The Rust Belt Gothic is a new political-aesthetic category, wherein the ignored or statistical pain of the nation’s abandoned industrial heart is made to glow with a Poe-like anti-vigor, an undead (but unnatural) force. Rochelle Hurt’s Youngstown is rife with fairy-tale inmates—a smallest sister, a favorite father, a quiet mother—yet the ruling spirits of the place are not humans but the corpsey avatars of place itself—the shuttered factory, the ruined ballroom, the big hungry plural baby of ‘the century’ with its singular familiar, Rust.  Rust paints its red sigil everywhere, blurring the inside and outside of bodies, homes, the city itself, which eventually, like a body, must split open to expose its red and rusty heart. This is a gory, half-delirious business, wonder- and grief-stricken, urgent and exacting, tender and hot, like an iron filing shifting in the palm.”
—Joyelle McSweeney


“In Rochelle Hurt’s breathtaking mixed work of prose poetry and verse, a history of place is caked in a ‘deep layer of red dust.’ The Rust Belt’s rattling structures and sutured-up asphalt roads are palpable here in every syncopated line and every musical sentence—in the flash of a worker’s lunch pail and in each drink stirred by a rusty nail that leaves ‘iron orange streaks’ on readers’ tongues.  And we know that this too is the taste of our blood. We know that in the broken heart of a country, what beats is the familiar pulse of a mother, a father, and siblings, slowly hammering scraps to hold family together. We know, from this new century, that it is art like this that endures.”
—Oliver de la Paz


“As moving as it is formally innovative, Rochelle Hurt’s The Rusted City is an elegy for the Midwest rust belt, and for a history that is not yet even past—and also the gorgeous tale of a family told through the eyes of its smallest daughter, who greets her rusted world with every magic word of childhood, all the serious play and terrifying loves of her youth.”
—Matt Bell


“Through the tiny window of the prose poem, The Rusted City paints a surreal landscape of an alternate Midwestern Rust Belt. Small domestic events resonate with the description of centuries (eons even) of the city’s history, causing macro and micro levels of sense-making in this strange, beautiful, and heart-breaking world. Through surprising image and impeccable timing, Rochelle Hurt has somehow managed to make a single family into an apt metaphor for American life. The Rusted City is outstanding, unique, and new—one of the best books I’ve read this year.”
—Sarah Messer


“Scrap gardens, metal shards, blankets of rust. A city collapsing, a house shut against itself, everywhere fragile bodies. A chronic cough, corrosion, exhaustion haunting the landscape. In a story too painful to tell, in a flood of stories so small yet so heavy that only archetypes can carry their weight (The Oldest Sister, The Quiet Mother), in increments of time so grand, so trivial (The Century of Silences, Spring Cleaning), Rochelle Hurt manifests shifts of perspective that are at once tectonic and barely perceptible. Her portrait of the hapless Rusted City and its inhabitants is unsettling, provocative, visionary, its magic hard won—a phoenix rising out of ash.”
—Holly Iglesias