Rochelle Hurt’s The J Girls: A Reality Show
Reviewed by Veronica Silva
What’s stunning about Rochelle Hurt’s third poetry collection, The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press), is the range of emotion contained in its tightly-wound world. Surrounded by glitter, waterbeds, and metallic bikinis, I found myself wincing at memories of my own adolescent excesses, indignant on behalf of the young protagonists as they navigate violences they can’t yet name—still, I felt tenderly toward them, laughed with them, as they decoded secret love letters written in pig Latin and boob-flashed unsuspecting PTA moms at the Taco Bell drive-thru. Like a true reality TV show, it hurts to look—but you can’t seem to pull yourself away.
Following the escapades of five teenage girls, this hybrid poetry-teleplay collection pinpoints with startling accuracy the intersection between exploring your identity and playing into your own exploitation as a young woman—a seemingly unavoidable effect when your body is both a threat to and threatened by patriarchal society. In the poem “Thigh High,” a monologue delivered by Joelle, the speaker notes that “Desire / is a far cry from the men’s palms / that cup our thighs without asking: / touch as a collar to say mine.” In this intimate, queer, youthful poem, the speaker understands her body is always at risk, yet calls on joy and tenderness: “We both giggled, but / I thought: What do they know / about gravity? The sky bowed / behind you all afternoon, waiting / for permission.”
The girls adorn themselves in Bath & Body Works spray and toe rings, “Springer-prepped” and popping bubblegum—an over-the-top construction of self which commands the lens: “Soap won’t wash the bull’s eyes off / our backsides, so why not don the darts ourselves?” The brilliance of the teleplay form is this: we know the girls are the ones holding the camera. Hurt’s compact wordplay and elevated diction reflect the aesthetic excess the girls engage in—instruments of play and parody in the same way Jocelyn dons “rhinestone eyelids, / two-inch acrylics, hair frosted in three tones.”
Hurt functions in various modes, combining vulgar puns, associative sounds, prayer, ode, and melodrama within her highly-textured world. A series of “Shame Soaps” from Jennifer’s perspective explores bodily autonomy and a Catholic school upbringing through associations of violent and sexual language: “a stitch sewn inside: a new place to hide: a fleshy flowering of red: a chiffon dread: hot little dress: ripped from a party: fabric fit for a hit: an execution…”. These coded text blocks driven by sound heighten Jennifer’s anxiety, her inability to directly express herself—which is in contrast to, for example, Jacqui’s tendency toward brash, cheeky odes: “...not closure so much as catalyst / for a round of gasps—good / as lifting my skirt. It’s intimate: / Listener, let me lay your ear / where I sit.”
Each J Girl maintains her individual voice and concerns, showing the different ways shame, violence, desire, and rage can manifest in these formative years—although I must admit it becomes easy to fuse the girls, a promise kept by the similar-sounding alliterative names. This “pluralizing” effect establishes a pattern of danger and the depersonalization that occurs when a body can be any body: “Your life was a smudge on the lens that made the room into a U—a stall any you could fit into.” Other times, the abundance of girls acts as a shield, a camaraderie in the knowledge that their volatility is feared and restricted, which they know must mean it is powerful: “…all hail feminine frivolity, most dangerous in numbers. / In endless rows of treadmill pendulums, we walk / a ticktock to silently say: Our time is coming. Any day.”
Another voice peeks through, too: the anonymous woman listed as playing “various roles” in the cast list. Interviews with the anonymous woman, who acts as an injection of the author’s voice amidst the fictionalized personas, reference real-world cases—such as the Lorena Bobbitt case, which became sensationalized in 90s media—to ground the collective violence the girls experience. Bite and wit abound across various monologues, commercial breaks, and interviews, directed by the insights of this older speaker. The J Girls: A Reality Show nurtures compassion for our younger selves by allowing girls to be girls—teenagers who “laugh in spirals and slather themselves with joy.”
Find out more about The J Girls: A Reality Show (and read some of the poems) here: The J Girls | Rochelle Hurt
Bonus Activity!
To best embody the playfulness and bawdiness of the J Girls, I’ve arranged colors, motifs, and lines from the book onto my favorite form of adolescent conjecture: the cootie catcher. With secret desires and exciting confessions scribbled deep in its pockets, I can almost imagine the J Girls peeking into its slits to read each other their fates. This cootie catcher can be used as a tool for teaching the book by inviting students to explore how the chain of themes, symbols, and quotes inform each other. Further instructions below:
Cutting and folding: Cut along the outside line of the cootie catcher. Flip the square text-face down. Fold the corners with colors into the center of the paper, so that they are touching. You should have colors and nouns on one side, and quotes from the poems on the other side. Flip it over, so the quotes are now facing up. Fold each corner toward the center; the nouns should now be facing you. Fold this square in half twice: first vertically, then unfold it, and then fold it again horizontally and unfold it—this will make it flexible. Put your fingers inside the pockets under the color words and push your fingers together so that the color words pop up in a peak. You should now have a finished three-dimensional cootie catcher.
To use for class or group discussion: Ask students to pair up; each duo should have a cootie catcher and an extra sheet of paper. The student holding the cootie catcher should have their partner pick a color and write down the chosen color. The student holding the cootie catcher should spell out the color, opening and closing the cootie catcher for each letter. Once they finish spelling out the color, the cootie catcher should be open to four nouns. The second student should pick a noun and write it down on the sheet of paper. Spell out the noun letter-by-letter. The cootie catcher will open to four nouns again. Pick one, write it down on the paper, then open the flap. Write down the revealed quote on the paper. Now, students should have an assortment of symbols, themes, and quotes to begin their discussion of the book.
Veronica Silva (she/her) is a first-generation Latinx poet who currently lives in Orlando, Florida. She is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of Central Florida. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in PANK Magazine, The Acentos Review, The Blood Pudding, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Pleiades.
Rochelle Hurt is the author of three poetry collections: The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press 2022), which won the Blue Light Books Prize from Indiana Review; In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize; and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine 2014). Her work has been included in Poetry magazine and the Best New Poets anthology. Hurt lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
