The past is haunting. It’s a common turn of phrase, but it still holds incredible weight. Jessica Rae Bergamino’s Girlhood x A Haunting examines this idea of past trauma being an oppressive, haunting force through an exploration of her childhood. Through a spectral retelling of her childhood experience with abuse, sexual assault, and neglect, Bergamino creates a connected narrative that bends genre; crime noir, memoir, and prose poetry.
Girlhood x A Haunting received Driftwood Press’ Editor’s Prize, which is no surprise given Bergamino’s unique storytelling ability and intentional prose. Her second full length collection, Girlhood x A Haunting finds a grim universality in girlhood, diving deep under the surface of adolescence to find a connection that most, if not all, girls and women share. Bergamino’s tale of survival is not only her own; it’s written so that readers can see their own girlhood in it and untangle the mysteries woven into their own adolescent crime scenes.
Although Girlhood x A Haunting is technically an exploration of Bergamino’s tumultuous childhood, her prose is infrequently told from her own perspective. Instead, she detaches herself from the writing of her trauma, purposefully telling it through the perspective of beloved femme crime icon, Nancy Drew. This notable narrative choice allows Bergamino to muddy the water between fiction and reality, creating a mystery with her childhood and its repercussions:
A clever girl, Nancy makes a decision. She’ll play the role of
detective, will approach her body as both the mystery and the clue.
She’ll separate herself from herself like the shell from the yolk, like
the truth from the dare. The villains will be obvious, easy to find.
She’ll know love scented soft as an old book with ribbons curling
down the spine. She studies her lines in the mirror, practices her
measured golly and gasp.
Nancy’s character is part of the mystery; the crime. But she’s also a part of the resolution, which we discover from the outset.
The first section of the collection—which is introduced only with the illustrated image of an eye—is written in first person present tense; Bergamino’s adult perspective. Bergamino opens up this collection with her separation from Nancy Drew, the girl she was—the girl she had to be in order to survive the crimes of her childhood:
My [ I ] thins in the menace of light.
Unsolid. Unsoiled.
A girl is a girl is a girl.
Is a subtext.
Is colony quivering towards collapse.
Memory picks at itself like carrion.
Bergamino uses this “I” encased in brackets frequently throughout Girlhood x A Haunting, especially while interjecting in Nancy’s narrative. But what does this [ I ] set out to do?
Bergamino’s clever use of punctuation is subtle and almost imperceptible, but its meaning is essential to her narrative. Her “I” hides between brackets from the recounted memories of her adolescence; it hides in the character of Nancy Drew. A child version of Bergamino protects herself from a world that seeks to hurt her by creating a shield, a barrier, a pair of brackets around the “I,” out of the illusion of Nancy. The idea that it was all happening to someone else; someone stronger and braver:
She could be unfastened like a garter, a swoon slipped from skin. She
could be the perfect daughter, the boiling water or the pot
that nevers. Me? I’m little more than a shive; I carry myself red as any
other meat. Luck strummed my cats from cradles, sung my
cupboards bare. I learned to be rampant as onions in spring, violent
as they said I was. Like a good crime scene, I was temporary. Open-
mouthed with evidence, I hunted for new ways to perform my body
as the swindle it was. Bad seeds spilled out of me, coarse across
the bed.
This stylistic choice not only experiments with traditional narrative poetry techniques, but it imitates the coping skills of a young girl self compartmentalizing. Nancy replaced Bergamino’s “I” until it was ready to come out of hiding, which was reflected in Bergamino’s clever use of writing mechanics:
—& it was twenty years before I could be
a Jessica again,
twenty years of unhooking myself
from myself,
aspiring to make myself a woman
when I wanted
to go on a girl forever—
Girlhood x A Haunting is—for the most part—written with a separation from Bergamino’s self. This not only gives her narrative of childhood trauma to fully shine through with all of its complexities, but it allows readers to find their own survival within her poetry.
Girlhood x A Haunting, by Jessica Rae Bergamino. Tampa, Florida: Driftwood Press, February 2025. 124 pages. $19.99, paper.
Casper Orr (he/him) is a trans disabled writer and artist specializing in memoir, cultural criticism, and lyric essays. He’s a Nonfiction Senior Editor for Fruitslice and Managing Editor of Noise Made By living on the east coast. He has work published or forthcoming in Archer Magazine, Electric Literature, Fruitslice, t’ART Press, and more. He can be found on Instagram: @casper.orr.
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