Reading Isabelle Correa’s debut collection, Good Girl and Other Yearnings, feels like sitting in a bar’s dimly lit corner booth with Correa herself. She’s drinking an old fashioned, spilling secrets through a lipsticked mouth, and you’re hanging on her words like they might save you. And they just might—not because she has any answers, but because she so easily ponders the ineffable, the existential thoughts we wonder about when curled into question marks at night.

At its core, Good Girl and Other Yearnings is an achingly honest obsession with wanting life to mean something. Is there such a thing as goodness? How do we go on living insular lives when the world is begging for more? Is anything still sacred? These are some of the questions Correa invites us to ponder alongside her. The collection opens with Invocation, in which she writes:

        “[...] Hands

        empty, I’m asking you for no small thing—
        give me meaning
        in the shape of loneliness,
        make the world a mirror, make me beautiful.”  [9]

The poems in GGAOY cut to the bone of the human condition: How we interact without really connecting. How we prioritize the wrong things and settle for anything that even looks like love. How we want to be understood, but also special. Through her poems, Correa takes us to buy a six-pack after EMDR, to reckon with lost apologies, interpret dreams and write poems in excel spreadsheets. She turns the human experience on every side and we nod along, feeling known.

The opening section of the collection unfolds with vivid recollections of girlhood. In Underwater Tea Party, Correa captures a snapshot of youth, sinking to the bottom of a pool, cross-legged with her sister, trying to guess what the other is saying. “I nod a current and we are/each a whole world. I thought/ we’d never be anything else.” She sets the tone for the rest of the book by exploring how innocence becomes marred by complexity.

Nostalgia is embedded in the corners of Correa’s poems—not the sticky-sweet wish for “the good old days” but a longing for past naivety before we know how life will unfold. Before we are forced to make sense of it all. As the book progresses, we see Correa grapple with the layered contradiction of existence, a tension that runs throughout and mirrors the complexities of modern life.

        “but the cashier asks for my ID anyway.  

        Perhaps as a compliment. I become

        eruptive with memory

        when she says, How are you?

        I have never not been afraid,  

        but that can’t be true. Surely,  

        once upon a time

        I was small enough

        to fit safely in my grandmother’s arms

        without any idea of death

        or how the people you love can

        transform into monsters”

        -Little Red Riding Hood Buys a 6-Pack after EMDR [58]

We watch her embark on an unflinching exploration of brokenness—relationships, identity, purpose. Still, there is always a call to hope. Together, we explore the human need to carry one another, even when we have no business doing so.

Correa’s poetic voice is strong throughout the collection.While it comes across effortless, bold, and natural, every word carries the most thoughtful precision. In each line lies a sense of perfectionism and control. She makes expert use of titles and line breaks, wields the kind of metaphors you’ll never hear again, and lands each poem with an ending that feels both like a slap in the face and salvation.

        “We take matter for granted

        as if just by existing
        we’ve done god a favor

        as if there is one

        there is
        someone somewhere
        looking out a car window
        silently mouthing the words
        to a song on the radio
        someone somewhere paying their bus fare
        in dimes to get off at the last stop.”

        -Soft Exit [90]

This is a collection that aches, but also heals. Correa’s confessional lines are somehow universal, revealing a brokenness that feels familiar, almost comforting. She invites us to sit with our failings, to wade through the questions, the neuroses, the despair, and to find, in the end, vulnerability is what keeps us human.

        “I worry

        I’ll get to the end of life

        having said this too shall pass

        about all the wrong things—

        it’s passing—

        it’s passing as I write this—”

It’s a confession that’s as hopeful as it is heartbreaking.

Isabelle Correa is a poet from Washington state now living in Mexico City. She studied creative writing at Western Washington University, is the winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of the chapbook Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus. Her work has appeared in Pank, Third Point Press, The Rebis, and more.

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