Body Shell Girl

Released 2022

Body Shell Girl is a memoir in verse about the first two years of a decade I spent in the sex industry in Canada.

think of my body as a shell
that I could vacate, not as metaphor, or symbol
but as a real possibility

Praise for the book:

“Trauma can destroy narrative or it can create a firestorm – in Body Shell Girl Rose Hunter has ploughed her memory and her “radioactive” journals to take us not just inside the debilitating machinations of her time in the sex industry but right inside the experience itself. A highly visceral reading experience that left me body-shocked and reeling. In Body Shell Girl Hunter annihilates misogynist fantasy word by word, page by page.”
—Sally Breen, author of The Casuals and Atomic City

“Body Shell Girl is incredible. It is a captivating and honest account of a woman’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings in the sex trade. Communicated with authenticity, you feel as if Rose is an old friend by the end of the book: she gives a voice to sisters who are too often unheard.”
—Cherry Smiley, from the Nlaka’pamux and Diné Nations, founder of Women’s Studies Online, Canada

“Shimmering, relentless and candid. You didn’t expect to find yourself here and neither did she; the author takes you deftly through hell with an unexpected tenderness.”
—Simone Watson, from Latji Latji Country in Victoria, Director, Nordic Model Australia Coalition (NorMac)

“Each poem in Hunter’s collection of graceful, imagistic poems takes the reader into dark journey into the commodification of those with less power, money, and status. She traces slow but ineluctable slide into the ways one can be devoured or erased by another, and inevitable need to do whatever is necessary to assuage the inner torment. … Hunter talks back to those who suggest that ‘sex work’ is empowering, and shows how, in late stage capitalism, the woman who thinks she will be engaging in a simple transaction quickly comes to realize that those who have the power to buy the body and life force of another are bleeding that person of existential self-determination, and the exchange of money is in no way sufficient to negate the physical and psychological wounds that cannot heal.”
—Susan Smith Nash, World Literature Today

“Hunter’s sixth full-length collection Body Shell Girl unfolds the title’s implication of a traumatic emptying-out of body-consciousness, and the addictions that the imperative to dissociate can tow in its wake. … The evanescent mirage of home and friendship is devastatingly proffered via the oblivion of vodka and bill-counting, a ritual bound to bleak repetition, just like the stuttering of fragmented, traumatic memory that recurs throughout this disturbing and most courageous work.”
—Marion May Campbell, read the full review in Cordite

“Rose Hunter’s harrowing, brutally honest account of her life as a sex worker in Canada at the end of the twentieth century is both revelatory and cautionary.”
—Charles Rammelcamp, read the full review in Compulsive Reader

“Body Shell Girl … blasts through the lies of the “sex work is real work” brigade and tells the truth in profound and unforgettable ways. It is a huge achievement. An act of great generosity. An attempt to equip succeeding generations of girls with essential knowledge of how to navigate this world. … Please read it and pass it on to all the young people in your life.”
—Nordic Model Now, read the full review here

“Rose Hunter takes us on a narrative journey in Body Shell Girl, proving that poetry need not be esoteric to be coded with feeling and meaning. … Even though Body Shell Girl is being marketed as a cautionary tale against sex work, I see it as a horror story about what it means to inhabit a woman’s body under patriarchal capitalism.”
—Jenny Hedley, read the full review in Mascara

“what Hunter brilliantly captures about this ‘strange sphere’ in Body Shell Girl (that which is often missed in the so-called prostitution debate): the million minute ways that ‘being for sale’ breaks down every aspect of your life, the survival behaviors and language you must cultivate to avoid male rage and violence, the impact of losing connection to your body when it no longer belongs to you, but also what it is like to be on the receiving end of stark-naked male entitlement, to be an unwilling actor in rote and porn-fed male fantasies, and to never ever being able to say no.”
—Elle Kamihira, Subject to Power podcast

Poems from the book that you can read online:

Quite a few poems from this book were published in literary journals (print and online). They are earlier and therefore often (slightly or quite) different versions of the poems compared to what ended up in the final book. Here are three that you can read online:

“Red Velvet Suite” in Overland (AUS)
“Just Like This With Cash Money” in Prelude (USA)
“Circus Catalogue” in Rise Up Review (USA)

And you can read the first poem of the book, as it appears in the book, along with a poem from the second and third sections, at Rochford Street Review.
And “Why We Are Girls” at Verse Daily.

Book launch:

Spinifex book launch video on YouTube (May 4, 2022).
Excerpt of Sally Breen’s launch speech at Rochford Street Review.

Interviews:

With Elle Kamihira on the Subject to Power podcast (2024).
With Andrew West on ABC Radio National (2024).
With Zofia Czubak on “Trafficking Tapes” (2024).
With Rick Zanotti and Susan Smith Nash on Life Edge (2023).
With Maree Buscke on Reality Check Radio (2023).
With Geneviève Gilbert at Pink Cross (2022).
With Ginger Gorman at BroadAgenda (2022).
With Peter Goers at ABC Radio Adelaide (2022). I am at 1:36:20 (15 mins).

Survivor testimony:

Read a bit more about my story alongside those of other sex industry survivors at Nordic Model Now and Wahine Toa Rising.

Other/related:

My article at the ABC, “South Australia is considering the legal status of sex work — it’s imperative that we listen to the experience of survivors.” (2024).
My interview at ABC Radio National (2024).

My talk with Sheila Jeffreys on Radical Feminist Perspectives about Jeffreys’ landmark book, The Idea of Prostitution (1997).
The edited transcript of our talk also appears at Nordic Model Now.

Where to buy the book:

Body Shell Girl is available in Australia/NZ from Spinifex Press and internationally from Amazon. It’s available as a Kindle ebook, as well as on Apple Books, Kobo, Nook, etc., and you can also order it from any bookstore, or from your local library (little-known fact: any member of a library can request a book purchase if the library doesn’t hold that title).