The following is an excerpt from Clare Rossini’s manuscript-in-progress.

The trees sort-of talk, Rock. Not you.
The rain’s damp chatter inflates to the tirade of storm.
But you, Rock—it’s shocking

how silent you seem.
You could be suffering bereavement, nursing a scar.
Or all riled up with extasis

like one of those mystics
I prayed to as a girl,
their bodies flaming as the spirit streamed through.

Orpheus plucked his lyre
and the stones came rolling.
Haven’t I strummed these stanzas with sufficient élan

to rouse your camouflaged heart?
Go ahead, Rock. Eke out a nicker, a squawk, a sharp


You negotiated the waves, Rock.
Then retired to my desk
to anchor its northern provinces. Your granite suit?

Yes, a bit staid.
Yet you’re endearing
in your restraint, who does not collude or acquire,

merge or liquidate, but seem nonetheless okay
with your status as a thing
that daily suffers the assault of lamplight,

and later, through the midnight window, starlight’s
tissue-gleam.
Klee’s word, 

,

“heavylight,” seems right for you. Palm-sized, fixed
in place, but in your perfect shape,
lifting into air.

Your inertness is convenient, Rock,
your blankness-in-waiting,
ready to acquire whatever thought

I ask you to take on, what cockleshells
of the heart. You can’t
shake me off, can’t unionize

or complain—I’m your Caesar, Rock,
and you, my conquered province.
It seems you have

little to say about your situation.
Or it is only that I don’t yet
hear your voice? Just as I’m deaf

to the grieving of the canyon’s river
as it dries to silt, the moans
of the drought-struck tree.

Master of the sugar crock, inquisitor of the vase, Morandi
would take the commission,
scumbling

your grayish white, Rock,
as you hunker here on my desk, deep in conversation
with my coffee mug.

Yes, the painter who briefly admired El Duce, Morandi
would touch in
your black flecks

as if quelling the claptrap of the goosestep, would see
in your soft undertones
the erasure of salute. Morandi, poet

of cracker tins,
who painted each shadow
like a poultice, as if to draw out the toxin of his shame.



Clare Rossini has published three collections of poems, the most recent of which is 

Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life), 1952. Oil on canvas; 21 3/8 x 23 3/8 in. (54.29 x 59.37 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, by exchange, through the bequest of Elise S. Haas © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

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To go insane is to burn up against the edges of one’s own mind, where thinking ends and grace begins. In the middle of a pandemic in a city I did not call my home, I was sitting on the windowsill of the sixteenth floor of an old GDR apartment building in Lichtenberg—the 

, the taxi drivers called it—fixing my gaze on the thumbnail-size dumpsters below my feet. I didn’t resent life so much as distrust it: I believed/suspected I was living in a simulation directed by an interplanetary AI, or I was locked in a nightmare from which I could wake myself if I simply pushed off the windowsill and dropped. In my head I was hearing voices that were telling me I was a prophet, and that if I jumped, I would not crash to my death, but—as Satan told Jesus—would be caught midair by angels, like the line from Toni Morrison: If I “surrendered to the air,” I could “ride it.” Quite frankly, I was losing my mind. I believed I was being tested by demons from antiquity, or remote CIA agents with microwave weapons beaming secret imperatives directly into my cochlea. The instructions were clear: I was not to eat or masturbate for ten days. And if I made it to ten days, I would gain nothing less than the powers of divination.

What was I thinking? That my day of reckoning had come—if not punishment, exactly, then some sort of hazing ritual of the soul. Manic, I did not sleep. I reread 

over the course of a single, putrid night, because I thought there were instructions hidden in its puns. By day, my voices instructed me to email and call friends and editors, with whom I believed I was telepathically communicating, and divulge inappropriate details about my sex habits and issue cryptic messages about God and the end of days. In what I believed to be prophetic inception, a voice told me my mother would die of the coronavirus if my sister followed through with a planned visit to my parents. So I called her, imploring her not to go to L.A. “I know you’re operating on multiple planes of reality right now,” my sister said, her voice measured and flat. I took this to be her admission that she was “in on it,” participating in some conspiracy—attributable, I was certain, to a single source—whose meaning was obscured from me, just barely, by a thin veil that I thought could be snatched from my mind’s eye at any moment, if I just had the right answer to this wretched riddle.

part of a conspiracy. A friend in Finland, upon reading an email I’d sent her during my mania, frantically fielded information from mutual friends in various parts of the world—Australia, New York, L.A.—and through chains of acquaintances found her way to my brother, on the one hand, who connected her with my family members, and on the other, to my roommate in Berlin, who coordinated with her to get me either to a mental hospital in Berlin or on a plane back to my parents’ house in California.

My roommate tried to get me committed, but I refused. I chose California. My episode lasted four days.

After my sister booked me a flight out of Berlin, I returned to live at my parents’ house in Diamond Bar, a suburb at the end of a brown and monotonous stretch of highway thirty minutes east of Los Angeles, toward Orange County. Diamond Bar not only is small but feels small, conjuring in the mind a montage of smog checks and hose water on sidewalks and imported eucalyptus trees and afternoon naps and Republi- cans and churches in office buildings with green windows and coyotes in the driveway. Arriving at the height of the pandemic, I could not always feel the contours of where personal trauma ended and mass devastation began. The plague shut down city after city at a speed so sweeping it felt biblical: Milan, London, Mumbai, New York, Jakarta. Watching the death counts surge into the hundreds of thousands offered a low, indecent charge that hummed like a lawn mower throughout an otherwise undifferentiated afternoon. To occupy myself, I got absorbed in staring spells at the poolside, heralded the fresh produce that arrived at our door, and took occasional walks along the nearby trail lined with cacti and warning signs for rattlesnakes.

Sunlight yawned. If this was the end of days, how could it be so dull? The hysteria of my insanity had merged with the ravaging of the world, yet the only emotion I felt capable of was boredom. Holed up in my bedroom, like a madman locked in his cell, I was to confront, once and for all, the fact of my unhappiness. Unlike the beat of metropolitan life, the time signature at my parents’ house followed the rhythm of long and insufferable hours invoked in me by the word “home,” which might, through discipline, be cauterized into something else entirely: understanding.

Blinking in the sun, I kept asking myself: Why did I go insane? Not just the fact of it, but why did I 

If this was the end of days, how could it be so dull? The hysteria of my insanity had merged with the ravaging of the world, yet the only emotion I felt capable of was boredom. 

I didn’t have the answers. I wasn’t even sure I had the right questions.

Technically, this was my second psychotic episode in the span of three years, and it seemed the far more devastating of the two, leaving me with even fewer certainties. The psychiatrists I consulted couldn’t draw any definitive conclusions about my diagnosis, due to the drugs I had been using (ketamine, DMT, some meth). As a junkie, I was hard for psychiatrists to take seriously, so in turn I didn’t take 

seriously. One psychiatrist told me that the brain damage from drugs was possibly permanent. He described a former patient who took acid once and—

“But I didn’t take acid,” I interrupted.

He just looked back at me with self-satisfied pity.

I must’ve looked wan. My hair, usually buzzed, was growing out into a black halo, and my mustache was too long, thick and straight on either side of my mouth, like a Chinese caricature. I was rife with self-scorn, something comfortably drip-fed in private after having so publicly drawn terror and pity from friends and family. During my episode, my sister had interrupted her presentations at work to take my erratic calls outside, then took a week and a half off because of the emotional turmoil. My brother checked out books on schizophrenia from the library. My mother couldn’t sleep, eyes sore from tears, afraid she might get a call in the middle of the night from a stranger in Berlin or Finland.

None of this was remotely my concern during my psychosis, which is to say my self-absorption. In my trance state, I was concerned, rather, with voices telling me specific names of people I knew in the city whom I was supposed to locate and tell secrets to. “Are you writing about or through a condition?” wrote a concerned editor, who gave me a list of links and phone numbers after I had sent her an email with my litany of conspiracies, which I was hoping she might publish somewhere, like a Q drop. My conviction was—as the pandemic seemed to suggest in its early stages—that these were apocalyptic days, and I was chosen to proclaim the truth to the nations and expose the hypocrisy of the wicked.

But if adulthood is marked by a certain equanimity toward meaninglessness and ambiguity, then it was surely adulthood that I had been putting off. What I can’t fathom now is how much certainty I’d felt in psychosis. I almost want to say purpose, with which I’d felt brimming. How pleasurable it was to be swimming in meaning. Every detail up to the outer fringes of my awareness was tinged with significance, like a saturated color. Accidents were taken for signs, signs were taken for wonders. In the unraveling of my mind, I encountered a breaking open of reason that I found grotesque but undeniably ravishing, even if it was batshit torture.

What felt so much like a betrayal when I returned to California—a pain like flat sunlight resting in my field of vision—was that, suddenly, I felt closed off from the supreme guiding intelligence I thought was issuing me commands, as if the entrance to a cave collapsed, barring me from its secret gold. Cast out, I felt like I was groping with pale arms in the dark, trying to rake through a black site for answers—any—to my only recurring question: Why?

Eventually, the lockdown did lift. By then, I had finished the twelve steps. Inventory, amends, all of it. In my memory, the first six months of sobriety had dragged, but I barely noticed the six months after.

When my sponsor “graduated” me from the steps, I asked him for one favor to send me off: Could he give me a tarot reading? “In the name of Christ,” I joked. He laughed bearishly and offered me this one occult indulgence.

He did the three-card reading. The first card, which represents my past, was the Emperor. Power, leadership, worldliness. The second, which represented my present, was the Eight of Wands. Creativity, rapid change, energy.

But when he flipped the third, I started once I saw it: the Fool. It’s the first card in the entire deck.

“What does that mean?” I asked. This was supposed to be my future.

He smiled ironically. “To approach life like a child.” ♦

 copyright (c) Geoffrey Mak, 2024, with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.

Geoffrey Mak is a writer based in New York. His essay collection 

California Gothic

To the Rock on My Desk

“If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition." —Bernice Johnson Reagon

No one is imagining the future very well. And when we try, it feels like a nightmare. The specter of fascism is often invoked on the Left, yet we are no longer sure whether that is the right name. On the one hand, the term is bandied about too easily. On the other hand, we would be wrong to think that all its possible forms have already existed and that we can call something “fascist” only if it conforms to established models. Imagining the future is not precisely a prediction. Imagining does not take place only in the mind. It requires an object, a medium, a sensuous form of expression. Imagining the future is more like the release of a potential through a sensuous medium, where the medium is not a simple vehicle for an already formed idea, but an idea that takes hold and assumes shape, sound, and texture, releasing a potential of its own.

No one really wants to imagine the future except those who foresee their businesses expanding and their capital accumulating, who see the future as the horizon of their own increasing power. To think that way is to not care whether that form of accumulation comes at the expense of the earth, other lives, or life in all its forms. And yet, in our acts and practices, we do implicitly reproduce an idea of the future, whether or not we know precisely what it is. We live this way now, assuming that living this way is the way to live, and once that repeated practice becomes a way of life, it comes to look like the way things simply are, or ought to be. But when the way of life that is reproduced destroys 

 ways of life, including its own, one has to ask how the pursuit of destruction is carried out by practices that are considered to be the way things just are, or have to be.

Climate destruction is the most terrifying example. It teaches us, however, not only that many now live with a fear of destruction that their way of life has helped to produce. It teaches us also that many have no idea 

 to live with that fear of destruction, which is a fear not only about the future in which events can happen at all but also about what is happening now, and what has been happening for some time. We look, we look away; we know, we fail to know. We live in the anxiety produced by knowing that we are not knowing what we secretly should and do know.

And what about war, like the actual ones waged in Ukraine and Gaza: Do those of us who live outside those regions know that destruction? What does it mean 

 to know it, even to know that it is unfathomable, exceeding the reach of knowledge? Or the decimation of peoples in the Amazon who are dying and predicted to die off, by virtue of corporate extractivism? And what about this pandemic still churning along at reduced rates, and the ones to come, which have so many people living with a sense of ambient death that they know neither how to mark nor how to mourn? And consider neoliberalism and the decimation of social and public services, the increasingly precarious character of work, the withdrawal of health care, retirement, rights to be protected against eviction: all of this underscores the increasing dispensability of lives, their induced precarity.

At this writing, over eighty million people globally are forcibly displaced from their homes, and approximately one in eight live in slums. The devastations of capitalism would take many books to catalog, and yet the sense of destruction, the destruction of what is most valuable, is with us all the time, either as an accomplished reality, an ongoing process, or a terrifying prospect. Many of us live with this sense that our lives, too, are dispensable, or could become so at a moment’s notice or eventually, that we could find, or already have found, ourselves with unpayable debts, bound to banks for life, securing their profits without being able to afford shelter. And what about all of us who do not know whether the future will provide affordable or accessible health care or any prospect of stable work that would secure the conditions of life for ourselves and those with whom we are interdependent?

Maybe all this seems far from gender. But when gender is figured as a threat to humanity, civilization, “man,” and nature, when gender is likened to a nuclear catastrophe, the Ebola virus, or full-blown demonic power, then it is this escalating fear of destruction to which political actors appeal. They see the escalating fear and know that they can make use of it for their own purposes, so they escalate it even more. There is the ready and continuous fear of destruction, the source of which is difficult to name, which is solicited and spiked to fortify both religious authorities and state powers—or their strengthening alliance, as we see in Putin’s Russia, the Republican Party in the United States, and various countries in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Africa. The displacement of this fear of destruction from its identifiable conditions of production—climate disaster, systemic racism, capitalism, carceral powers, extractivism, patriarchal social and state forms—results in the production of “cultural” figures or phantasms invested with the power to destroy the earth and the fundamental structures of human societies.

Precisely because that destruction is happening without its sources being named and checked, the fear and anxiety congeal without a proper vocabulary or analysis, and “gender” and “critical race theory” are produced and targeted as the causes of destruction. Gender is not just a matter of individual identity, but a category that describes the division of labor, the organization of states, the unequal distribution of power. Gender has never been “merely cultural” but has been cast that way by opponents who want to regard gender as a secondary concern or those who believe that cultural pathologies are responsible for social worlds breaking apart. Once identified as a cause of destruction, gender itself must be destroyed, and what follows is censorship, the de-departmentalization of gender studies and women’s studies, the stripping of rights of health care, increased pathologization, restricting spaces for public gathering, the repeal or rejection of laws that protect against discrimination, and the passing of laws that segregate, silence, and criminalize those who are trying to live their lives without fear. All those laws say: No, you will live your lives with fear, or perhaps you will not even count as a life at all.

Gender is not just a matter of individual identity, but a category that describes the division of labor, the organization of states, the unequal distribution of power.

Let us remember that the killing of women and trans, queer, bisexual, and intersex people is an actual form of destruction taking place in the world. The killing of Black women, the killing of Black queer and trans people, the killing of migrants, including queer and trans migrants—all these are destructive acts. As the numbers increase, it becomes increasingly apparent whose lives are considered dispensable, and whose lives are not. The inequality of the grievable makes itself known. Once gender, in its phantasmatic and abbreviated form, comes to include abortion rights, access to reproductive technology, sexual and gender health services, rights for trans people of any age, women’s freedom and equality, queers of color’s freedom struggles, single parenting, gay parenting, new kinship outside of heteronormative models, adoption rights, sex reassignment, gender-confirming surgery, sex education, books for young people, books for adults, and images of nudity, then it represents a wide range of political struggles that its opponents seek to shut down in their effort to restore a patriarchal order for the state, religion, and the family, an authoritarianism for the present. The only way forward is for all those targeted to gather themselves more effectively than their enemies have, to recognize their alliance, and to fight the phantasms prepared for them with a powerful and regenerative imaginary that can distinguish between the destruction of life and a collective life-affirmation defined by struggle and even irresolution.

It seems clear that fascist passions or political trends are those that seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live, and to do so either without regard for their probable demise, or because fascism is an effective mode of annihilating those lives, or establishing their dispensability. By contrast, authoritarianism is usually understood as a form of state power, but authoritarians emerge from within democratic regimes, elected precisely by stoking fascist passions, escalating the fear of destruction by social movements that converts into a moral alibi to destroy other people’s lives. The authoritarian who seeks to stoke fascist passions knows too well that the fear of destruction already courses through those who have seen the destruction of the climate, the environment, labor unions, and prospects for financial security. When that fear is both inflamed and organized by the syntax of the phantasm, “destruction” is located externally, in foreign people or languages, in elite powers, both of which are packed into “gender,” which threatens to invade and destroy. The attack on gender engages age-old conspiratorial logics to prop up anti-democratic regimes. If the foreign sources are characterized as Jewish, then that is apparently all the more effective in converting the fear of destruction into fascist passion.

Perhaps arguments do not have the power to address the fear of destruction that motivates the anti–gender ideology movement. The movement taps into a sense of a world on its way to immolation, and incites that fear to rally support for its “moral” plan for destruction. There is hardly an instance of the anti-gender movement that does not claim to be saving the children—from harm. The movement finds, stokes, and organizes that fear wherever it can. The tactic is clever and effective, for few things could be more personal and singular than the fear for one’s bodily safety or that of one’s children or those who are most proximate.

But as one fear is allayed for some, another is escalated for those who are targeted: the fear of being injured, killed, pathologized, or incarcerated seizes trans and queer kids, adolescents in search of health care, and young people, including girls, in need of reproductive health services, who are hurt by this movement that claims to be “saving the children.” Equally painful is the fear that women feel on the streets as they seek simply to live their lives and move freely without fear. To realize how many women and LGBTQIA+ people are seized with fear on the street, in the workplace, or in their homes is to begin to know how pervasive and corrosive that fear can be. It matters how many Black and brown people undergo that fear in proximity to the police or the storeowner who regards them with suspicion, how many young Black people in the United States, for instance, have their breath choked out of them by police who know in advance that they will be exonerated. It is a singular fear for one’s life, and at the same time, it is also someone else’s, the fear that someone else felt before they died, the one a parent felt when they sent their kid for groceries at the corner store. What if political movements were forged from all those who fear discrimination and violence in public and private spaces, who demand to live and love freely without fear of violence? Perhaps then “the fear of destruction” could be identified in a way that shows how its fascist exploitation is so egregiously wrong.

When gender politics remain restricted to the liberal sphere of individual rights, it cannot address the basic rights to housing, food, non-toxic environments, unpayable debt, and health care that should belong to any struggle for social and economic justice. When countries and regions are coerced into accepting a version of rights that leaves their basic needs unaddressed, it is no wonder that skepticism emerges about those very rights. And when those rights are framed in terms that do not translate well into local cultures, then the critique of cultural imperialism is not without justification. For the critique of financial coercion and cultural imperialism to become an integral part of a transnational gender politics, we will need to remind people why and how they desire to live, reclaiming life for the Left, finding life in the relations that sustain us, the alliances formed among all those who seek to realize equality and freedom within a livable world, an enduring and regenerative earth. This means living with our profound differences without succumbing to the destructive forms we must oppose.

The only way out of this bind is to ally the struggle for gender freedoms and rights with the critique of capitalism, to formulate the freedoms for which we struggle as collective ones, and to let gender become part of a broader struggle for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity and provides health care, shelter, and food across all regions. Such an agenda would develop an understanding of the formation of the individual within a social world, the individual body as bearing the trace of the social in its relations with others, both actual and implied—a body at once porous and interdependent. It would mean accepting that, as human creatures, we persist only to the extent that we are bound up with one another. When we say

, we are speaking about these distinct selves but also about social freedoms that should be accorded to everyone as long as no real harm is done. And for that caveat to work, we have to expose the fear-mongering that would recast fundamental freedoms as harms, and make freedom into a new and vital object of desire. To live according to such a maxim means that we must distinguish between actual harms and those that grip the imagination as imminent possibilities, manufactured by those in the business of inciting hatred. But we cannot learn how not to cause harm if freedom itself is regarded as a harm, or if we become convinced that struggles for equality, freedom, and justice are hurting the world. Let us show instead that the world, the earth, depends upon our freedoms, and that freedom makes no sense when it fails to be collective, no matter how difficult staying in emancipatory collectivities might be.

For those who think that gender is a secondary oppression or that feminists should get in line behind the presumptively masculine Left, it is time to rethink the coordinates of the contemporary political map. Gender is not a secondary issue for Orbán, Putin, or Meloni, but a key rallying point in the defense of national values and even national security. For feminists who think that trans rights or LGBTQIA+ mobilizations are a distraction or a menace, they should, quite frankly, realize that all of our struggles are now linked as we seek to overcome the powers seeking to deprive us of basic conditions of livability. There can be no successful struggle against the forces denying women basic rights without recognizing everyone who is a woman, without acknowledging that these same forces are closing down borders in the name of racist and nationalist ideals, and targeting lesbian, gay, gender nonconforming, and trans youth, especially youth of color.

We may think that the anti–gender ideology movement is wrong, but why maintain that it is fascist as well? As I insisted at the outset of this book, fascism names the passions, but authoritarianism the emerging, if not accomplished, political reality. On

 online, which attracts hundreds of thousands of listeners, Knowles, a right-wing commentator and featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States, stated the following:

If transgenderism [sic] is false, as it is, then we should not indulge it, especially since that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of so many people. If it is false, then for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion,

 transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely

. The whole preposterous ideology—at every level.

The language of eradication belongs to fascism, and today it is directed not only against trans people but against all those who have been clustered under the signs of “gender” and “critical race theory” and “wokism.” The ready definitions for fascism tend to rely on the study of its twentieth-century form, so new vocabularies are required to understand new iterations of fascism that have emerged in the last decades. Given the shifting character of economies and the contemporary ways of extending militarized forms of power to the police, prison, and the patrolling of national borders, we are faced with a combination of neoliberalism and intensified forms of security that rationalize the destruction of lives and livelihoods.

When gender politics remain restricted to the liberal sphere of individual rights, it cannot address the basic rights to housing, food, non-toxic environments, unpayable debt, and health care that should belong to any struggle for social and economic justice.

Contemporary authoritarians may not consider themselves to be fascists, but they rely on fascist technique and stoking fascist passions to stay in power. The new authoritarians rail against social movements, including feminism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQIA+ rights and freedoms, against civil rights and the protection of the rights of migrants and refugees, all of which are cast as internal enemies threatening the nation, or as external ones about to break down the door and threaten the phantasmatic purity of the nation.

Perhaps it is in the exhilarations of shameless sadism that one finds fascist potentials in the present. All of the contemporary authoritarians promise a “liberation” from a leftist superego that would affirm trans lives, “woke” culture, and feminist and anti-racist struggles. This shameless attack on progressive social movements unleashed a “liberation” from moral accountability and an entitlement to privilege and power that, in turn, demonstrated its triumph by destroying the basic rights of migrants, queer people, women, Black and brown people, and the Indigenous. These authoritarians seek to bolster their public support by destroying any sense of common political belonging in favor of nationalist, racist, patriarchal, and religious forms of sociopolitical supremacy, subordination, and dispossession. The posture and practice of impunity and shamelessness that we find in the figures of Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Meloni, and Erdoğan, for example, are distinctly different from so-called charismatic fascists of the twentieth century. The contemporary fascist trends—ones that engage in death-dealing and rights-stripping in the name of defending the family, the state, and other patriarchal institutions—support ever-strengthening forms of authoritarianism.

That is why it makes no sense for “gender-critical” feminists to ally with reactionary powers in targeting trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people. Despite our differences, we have to create a struggle across differences that keeps the source of oppression in focus, testing our theories about the other by listening and reading, remaining open to having one’s traditional suppositions challenged, and finding ways to build alliances that allow our antagonisms not to replicate the destructive cycles we oppose. We cannot oppose discrimination against ourselves only to support it for others. We cannot oppose systematic forms of hatred against one group by allying with those who would intensify that hatred in multiple directions. We cannot censor each other’s positions just because we do not want to hear them. It is no time for any of the targets of this movement to be petty and divisive, for to defend gender studies and the importance of gender to any concept of justice, freedom, and equality is to ally with the fight against censorship and fascism.

Admittedly, we are not seeing fascist states on the order of Nazi Germany, but even that history advises us not to look away from the fascist potentials that are increasingly actualized in several regions of the world through the anti–gender ideology movement. Since fascism emerges over time, we need to know the steps by which it emerges and to identify fascist potentials when they appear. None of this implies that fascist potentials will materialize as fascist regimes, but if readiness to resist is imperative, which it is, then we have to identify those potentials and act against their escalating momentum. We can stop that momentum, but only by intervening as an alliance that does not destroy its own bonds. For that would be to reiterate the logic that we oppose, or that we should oppose.

Rather, releasing radical democratic potentials from our own expanding alliances can show we are on the side of livable life, love in all its difficulties, and freedom, making those ideals so compelling that no one can look away, making desire desirable again in such a way that people want to live, and want others to live, in the world we envision, where gender and desire belong to what we mean by freedom and equality. What if we make freedom into the air we together breathe? After all, that is the air that belongs to us all, sustaining our lives, unless, of course, the toxins—and there are many—pervade the atmosphere. ♦

Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley, and the acclaimed author of many books. The following is an exclusive excerpt from

, which is out this spring from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. On April 6, Pioneer Works will co-present the book's New York launch at Dia Chelsea, with

Who's Afraid of Gender?

By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter

, out this month from David Zwirner Books and edited by Hilton Als. Occasioned by an exhibition of Walter’s paintings that Als curated in 2022, the book examines the life and legacies of a remarkable artist who toiled in obscurity before his death in 2009—and his subsequent “discovery” as a major figure, by the art world’s cognoscenti, after a small portion of his vast body of work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2017

 This essay examines a formative period in the life of an artist who was born and spent most of life on the small Caribbean island of Antigua—but who decamped in 1961 to live and work, in solitude, in the lush forests of the nearby island of Dominica.

To reach the Ding-a-Ding Nook—a place in Antigua that appears on no map, but whose name has long fed the historical imagination of this small and arid island in the Leeward Antilles—you leave the Caribbean capital where Frank Walter was born, and head south. You roll through sunbaked hills dotted with prim concrete homes and the crumbling remnants of a sugar trade that was, for centuries, Antigua’s lifeblood and its curse. You pass hamlets whose names—Piccadilly, Piggotts, English Harbour—underscore that the island’s 108 square miles were owned, from 1632 clear until 1981, by England’s kings. And then, after a half hour’s drive and in the parish of Saint Paul’s, you reach the first village the English founded here. From the sleepy jetty in Falmouth, it’s a hot mile’s walk along a rocky track lined by cacti and scrub to a beautiful, empty beach. Its chalk-white sand and turquoise water belong in an internet ad touting Antigua’s “365 beaches (one for each day of the year!)” to tourists, who are the island’s lifeblood now. Here, or on a hill nearby at any rate, the legend of the Ding-a-Ding Nook was born.

It began, as the story goes, on a moonlit night not long after Antigua’s first English governor, Edward Warner, arrived from nearby Saint Kitts, where his father, Sir Thomas Warner, had founded an English colony in 1626. Six years later, the son built a house near Falmouth for his wife and children. But late one night while he was away, his wife heard a worrying noise. Mrs. Warner opened a window and looked down toward the beach. Long canoes, carved from tall trees on an island more forested than this one, were sliding ashore. From their sides leapt a party of Caribs—members of the Indigenous group for whom the Caribbean is named, and many of whose descendants now call themselves Kalinago, for the word in their language meaning “human being.”

The Caribs’ forebears had left the South American mainland a few centuries before. They’d worked their way up the Antillean chain, often forcing out the islands’ previous inhabitants. The Caribs were not, in the 1630s, maintaining a steady presence on Antigua—this dusty island had nothing on the lush mountains of their main redoubt, 120 miles to the south. Dominica, as that island was named by Christopher Columbus (he happened to sail past it on a Sunday), was known to them as Waitukubuli, meaning “tall is her body.” But the Caribs had grown wary of the claims of the English on the Leeward Islands. And upon landing in Antigua that night, they surrounded the governor’s house, then bound Mrs. Warner and her children with cords. And then—after swinging one child’s head against a rock—they made off in their canoes toward the south.

Edward Warner returned home the next morning to find a child dead and his family gone. He gathered a boatful of men with guns and sailed south toward the Caribs’ home base in Dominica. He alighted on the steep green shores of an island often ringed, thanks to trade winds, by rain clouds. Warner confronted his wife’s captors. He eventually managed, with the help of his guns, to get her back. But afterwards he wasn’t convinced that her honor was intact. Overcome with jealousy, he did not welcome his wife back into their marital home in Antigua. Instead, he installed her in a walled “keep” down the shore, which he dubbed the Ding-a-Ding Nook.

The misery to which poor Mrs. Warner was subjected did not lessen the hostilities between her husband’s dysfunctional clan and the Indigenous people with whom the Warners were entangled in numerous ways. For if Edward Warner’s wife did lie with a Carib, she wasn’t his only kin to do so. His father, Sir Thomas, had fathered a son with a Carib woman. “Indian Warner,” as Edward’s half brother was known, managed to become a leader of his mother’s people in Dominica, before a third brother, Philip Warner, traveled there a few years later to summon him to a fallacious peace summit. Philip Warner shot Indian Warner dead. In those days, while killing “Indians” was not considered a crime by the English Crown, killing one’s brother was, and Philip Warner, convicted of fratricide, was imprisoned in the Tower of London.

The jail in Antigua where Philip Warner’s sister-in-law lived out her days wasn’t built of the same lasting stuff as the Tower of London. But its memorable name endured to be attached to a cave by a beach near to where Frank Walter—centuries later on a hilltop outside Falmouth— forged his mammoth oeuvre. It’s hard to say when and how exactly Walter seized on this story to the degree that he declared himself the Seventh Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a-Ding Nook. But Walter—who would have his own formative run-ins with the wild island of Dominica, and who was obsessed with the oft-occluded racial mixing that typifies many family trees in the Caribbean—seized on it indeed.

The island of Antigua, where Frank Walter grew up, was indelibly shaped, as was he, by the sheer and bloody fact of Antigua’s having been owned by the English for 350 years. Its Spanish name may have come from Columbus, who sailed past in 1493 and named the island’s scrubby peaks for a cathedral in Seville, but no European who perused its harbors saw fit to set up shop in a lasting way until Edward Warner in 1632. While nearby islands—Saint Lucia, Dominica, Trinidad—were swapped multiple times among the English, French, and Spanish colonial powers, Antigua was only ever held by the English, who brought the industry that long defined the region: Big Sugar.

This business that brought millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas to process sugarcane on an industrial scale was first “perfected” in Portuguese Brazil. An Englishman, James Drax, brought a boatload of giant rollers and copper pots from there to Barbados in the 1640s. In so doing, he transformed that English island from a struggling colony of tobacco farmers into a sugar juggernaut. A few decades later, Drax’s cousin Christopher Codrington founded a plantation on Antigua that became the first locus of an industry that by the mid-1700s would blanket the island with over a hundred such estates, brutally minting English fortunes from sucrose. And it was Codrington’s activities as the planter and potentate who leased Antigua’s sister island of Barbuda from the Crown in toto that most shaped this seat of British naval power in the Leeward Islands, which Horatio Nelson, after visiting in 1784, called “a dreadful hole.”

By the time Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter was born in 1926, Antigua’s sugar trade was a century into its long decline. After slavery’s abolition in the 1830s, some plantations closed. Others didn’t, and their Black workers’ lives differed little from those of previous generations. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with the rise of cheap travel, that tourism became Antigua’s main industry. In 1948, Frank Walter, a star graduate of the Antigua Grammar School, made history as the first Black man to become a manager, at the age of just twenty-two, in the Antigua Sugar Syndicate. This jumping of the color bar signaled the slow but growing movement among Black Antiguans, who comprised nine-tenths of the populace, toward self-rule. However, the position Walter won in the island’s agricultural economy and its vexed racial hierarchy also fed his keen interest in his European forebears, from whom he got his surname, as opposed to his kin with African roots, far more numerous, who gave him his complexion.

To the outsider steeped in contemporary efforts to confront Eurocentric biases, Walter’s affinities, in this regard, may seem strange. But the riddle of identity has long been tricky in the Caribbean. On islands whose native peoples were largely killed off and that are now populated by the descendants of enslaved Africans and crooks and outcasts from elsewhere, the search for “roots”—for a grounded sense of identity and home—has traced many routes. In some places, the descendants of both colonists and the enslaved embrace their islands’ Indigenous pasts. The overwhelmingly Iberian and African populace of the once Spanish island of Puerto Rico has made the language and lore of its native Taíno (“Boricua!”) key to Puerto Rican-ness now. The Rastafarians of Jamaica voice ties to an African emperor in a far-off land—Ethiopia—that’s as distant from their forebears’ own as Jamaica is from the Arctic. Walter’s tack was different from these. But he was by no means the only Caribbean person of African descent to have nurtured, as a path to a proud sense of self, a deep interest in courtly circumstance and European gentry. The best known in a long line of such figures is Henri Christophe of Haiti, who built his magnificent Sans-Souci Palace in the early 1800s. Upon declaring himself king of a new Black nation, Christophe did not gild his court with the icons of his Bambara and Igbo ancestors. Instead, he based his claims to peerage and power in a new nobility while designing his own coat of arms according to customs of heraldry from France. Haiti’s Roi Christophe was the first, but—on these islands shaped for five centuries by the mores and ideas of Europe—he would not be the last. Walter’s own interest in noble airs was, by his own account, stirred by his grandmother’s tales of how his ancestors had descended “in patience and resignation from the grandest mansions and bluffs in Antigua” to homes like the humble house in Saint John’s where she raised him.

On islands whose native peoples were largely killed off and that are now populated by the descendants of enslaved Africans and crooks and outcasts from elsewhere, the search for “roots”—for a grounded sense of identity and home—has traced many routes. 

Walter’s grandmother did not tell him what recent scholarship has revealed: that a preponderance of the enslaved Africans who disembarked at Saint John’s docks came from the Bight of Biafra, on the Gulf of Guinea along Ghana’s so-called Gold Coast. Significant numbers also arrived from ports in places such as Senegambia and Sierra Leone. These facts aren’t taught in Antigua’s still deeply British schools. As in much of the West Indies, traces of African cultures—for example, the popular mancala-like board game known as warri—are passed on informally, as oral lore and in folk rhymes invoking, say, the Ashanti roots of many Antiguan people (“Shanti-shanti, go put on panty!”). If such tales featured in Walter’s youth, he was much more drawn to the side of the family he could research in books: the owners of the island whose lineage and deeds were recorded in the kind of written records that Walter, as a scholar and a “true Anglo Saxon,” revered.

He especially loved recounting the life story of his forebear John Jacob Walter, an enterprising German who left the Rhineland in the 1700s and initially worked in Antigua as a baker. After winning a lucrative contract to supply bread to the Royal Navy, John Jacob Walter turned his profits into estates. He would bequeath the Walter surname to eleven children born to the mulatresse with whom he partnered in Antigua, and to those children’s future progeny, both enslaved and free. That part of Frank Walter’s line was plain. More creative were the ties he conjured, reaching back centuries, to King Charles II. Frank Walter called the king “Charles Francis Walter” and claimed that, before his restoration to England’s throne in 1660, he founded a secret Royalist refuge in Antigua for European nobles in exile. (Walter also wrote that while Charles was on this unrecorded trip to the tropics, he grew as “sable” in hue as Walter.)

The Antiguan-born writer Jamaica Kincaid, who grew up in Saint John’s in the 1950s, attended a primary school named to embody all that she loathed about the island’s colonial legacy. In A Small Place (1988), she writes bitterly of being taught to revere a minor royal whose ballyhooed visit to Antigua to dedicate the Princess Margaret School was occasioned by the banal fact that, back in England, the love life of this “putty-faced princess” was a mess. Frank Walter felt differently: he spent those years telling anyone who would listen that he was a suitor far more eligible by pedigree to wed poor Margaret than was the Earl of Snowdon. When, in 1953, Walter left Antigua to tour Europe with the nominal aim of gaining the knowledge he needed to modernize Antigua’s sugar trade, his trip’s deeper import was seeing in person the castles and storied dales that shaped his sense of himself. Despite the poverty and prejudice he experienced, “the closer I got to Europe,” he said, “the less strange I began to feel.”

Walter spent nearly eight years wandering the continent. Decades later, he would still be committing his memories of its northern light— Scotland’s heather, Bavaria’s gray but glowing peaks, “the multi-colored illumination of the vast Lombardian valley”—onto cardboard with paint. Walter’s vast corpus includes thousands of pieces that refract the sun-soaked vistas of the Caribbean. No small part of his power as a painter of place derives from his will to capture the genius loci of the varied landscapes he absorbed by articulating, in shades muted or bright, their echoes with each other. Europe proved vital to Walter’s larger journey toward self-making. But it was on the island of Dominica, where he first settled upon returning to the Caribbean in 1961, that he became the artist whose endeavors still resonate, as I found on a recent visit to “the nature island,” where he realized an outsized vision of a landscape he also shaped.

“You know, this is the only place in the West Indies,” a friend says soon after I land in Dominica, “where every day, the sun shines through raindrops.” He was right, on that drizzly but rainbow-bright August afternoon. And he’s been right on every day I’ve had the good fortune to spend on the island to which Walter moved in 1961 to realize a more personal vision of “industrial development.” He’d been informed, about his return to the Caribbean, that his ideas for modernizing its agribusiness were no longer needed. So he boarded a steamer for Dominica and disembarked at Portsmouth, an old banana port in the north where he had cousins. There, on twenty-eight acres of Crown land he had won permission to develop, he set out to turn an elevated patch of Dominica’s jungle into the project he called Mount Olympus.

There is a reason Dominica is called “the nature island.” Whereas Antigua touts a beach for each day of the year, the analogous line in Dominica hails 365 rivers tumbling down from mist-shrouded peaks onto rocky shores. Dominica’s forbidding heights allowed it to remain an Indigenous holdout. Today it is the only island in the Antilles with a visible Indigenous community—its members maintain a Kalinago Territory along the windswept Atlantic coast. Portsmouth, on the island’s calmer Caribbean side, is a sleepy place. Its main street’s most happening spot is a café, Miss Olive’s Shop, named for the “huckster” on whose steamer Walter arrived here. At Miss Olive’s Shop, taxi drivers breakfast on saltfish and coffee, by a parking lot where windshields are adorned with oblique, often pious phrases—REDEMPTION, NEVER THIRSTY, JESUS DID IT AGAIN. Later in the day, the taxi drivers’ vans will convey passengers along treacherous roads through Dominica’s bush, to the island’s capital and elsewhere.

There aren’t many people here who recall Frank Walter: it’s been more than half a century since he abandoned his Mount Olympus project. But one person who does remember his doings is a gentle farmer and musician who, in the Rasta way, doesn’t go by his “government name” but rather by a moniker, I-Noah, that rejects slavery’s scars. I-Noah is very happy to explain his familial ties to “Uncle Frank” and to share his memories of a man whose plot of avocado trees I-Noah has tended since he returned from a European sojourn of his own that lasted, he says, “seven years, six months, twenty-two days.”

The length of I-Noah’s time away and his oddly precise diction are not his only traits that recall the great-uncle with whom he deeply identifies. He tells me this when I find him at the spot where he’s waiting for the World Bank to build a new cinder-block house to replace the one he lost in Hurricane Maria in 2017. He tells me how it was his talent as a calypso singer that brought him to Europe in the 1990s, and that he enjoyed living in France and touring the continent. But once he and his girlfriend-manager fell out (“when you make nice music,” he explains, “women does flock so”), he came home with the plan of “living natural” and feeding himself from the rich patch of sod that had been in his family for generations. Its bounteous avocado trees, he says, were planted by his Uncle Frank. I-Noah has memories from boyhood, he says, of Uncle Frank making him toy cars from sardine cans, and of Uncle Frank tromping up the mountain to where he felled the same towering gommier trees the Caribs had once turned into canoes, but which his Uncle Frank processed into charcoal. Others older than him, I-Noah says, will recall more.

We find a cane-wielding gent who gives his name as Webster Brody but says that everyone calls him Ti Baby. He recalls that no one could understand, when he was a boy, how one man produced the thirty bags of charcoal that Walter brought each week to market on a tricycle. “But Mister Walter was a mysterious man,” Ti Baby muses, mysteriously. “He did carry a small red book.” A man with glaucous eyes and gray dreadlocks whom people call Lepo then speculates, recalling Walter’s aspect, about the source of his power: “Him was a serious man. Him no skin teeth.” (He wasn’t, that is, given to grinning.) The most expansive account comes from Mico, or King Mico, as I-Noah calls him on account of the nineteen times he has been crowned calypso king of Dominica’s north. King Mico says that “Mister was a mystic man. An inventor and a scientist. An architect.” King Mico is sitting in his one-room home surrounded by drying piles of herbs. He fixes me with a sage glare. “Mister did turn his mental power on the mountain, into physical.” Behind him on a shelf, next to bottles of ginger wine, sits a plastic-jeweled crown. He wants to be sure I understand what Walter, beyond the feats of his productivity, drew from his time there. What he says—“Mister did build his self on the mountain, where nature met him in fullness”—echoes Walter’s own writings on how, in the jungle, his industry fed his art. “Light and Shadows became my best companions,” Walter noted. When not working under the moon or making carvings, he often slept in the jungle on a crocus bag. As he was moving kilns and cutting trees,

The wind became my lover, as it caressed me and tickled me and rejuvenated me to this productive task, and the sunlight fed me, with its direct lunch of mid-day rays, as more often aiding the wind the persistent raindrops kissed my cheeks, to cool me beyond my desire. Even so I would chop the faster.... It was an enriching Coventry, and a Hermit’s Exile, I was brought closer and closer to contact with God and Nature in this divine stillness.

In the stillness of morning time, I meet I-Noah and a man called Roland to trek up a dirt track that leads, after a sweaty forty minutes, to a vine-choked clearing. The edge of what was once Walter’s acreage is now adorned, as are many patches of high ground the world over, with a cell phone tower. The view, of the whole of the bay at Portsmouth and the Cabrits promontory beyond, is magnificent. Roland has tended a nearby plot of dasheen for decades, and he points into the bush with his cutlass, to where Walter’s trolleys ran on wooden tracks he built himself, from his coalpits down to where he’d load his tricycle for market. “All down this everlasting hill,” Roland says, “Mister rolled it so.” Walter’s tracks would have been lubricated with the thick green slime that is won, Roland demonstrates, from crushing leaves between one’s fingers.

The regrown forest is too thick to fight through with a single cutlass. But we’re able to hike around, another way, to the parcel’s bottom. There, by a burbling stream that lines the lower edge of Walter’s old domain, we stand among the smooth legs of Bwa Mang trees. Crabs scuttle along the trees’ slablike roots as an army of frogs croaks under dripping limbs. It isn’t hard to understand why Walter described this as the place where he “discovered that nature had its own language,” or that it convinced him that building “a suitable domicile for the development of Industry, Philosophy and Art is no tremendous Utopian Dream.”

When, in 1965, Walter took a well-earned break from his labors to return briefly to England, his main aim was to acquire steel tracks and carts to replace his wooden ones. I-Noah pulls out his phone to play us a recording of his uncle describing, in what Walter called his “Oxford Heidelberg accent,” how he was denied entry at Southampton by officials who cared not a jot about the equipment he needed but were bemused by this sable-skinned colonial’s insistence that he was a blood relative of the Duke of Bedford. “They were afraid,” says I-Noah to Roland’s nods, “of his power.”

In poverty, Frank Walter created the kind of life that, in its wholesale devotion to making work, many artists fantasize about having but few ever realize. 

Two years later, Dominica’s government offered Walter $50,000 to return to their domain the acreage he had cleared for planting. He’d hear none of it. He said the labor he poured into his Mount Olympus Industrial and Agricultural Estate was priceless, and he’d been speaking with a Canadian maker of stereo equipment who was keen to buy his charcoal. His ensuing departure for Antigua, when it grew clear that the government would not grant him the title, was bitter. But back in Saint John’s, behind a photography shop there, after eight years of absorbing Europe’s sights and six more with Dominica’s murmuring trees, he turned in earnest to the artistic practice that would lead him, ultimately, to the hilltop over Falmouth where he found the “peace tranquility” he required.

In poverty, Frank Walter created the kind of life that, in its wholesale devotion to making work, many artists fantasize about having but few ever realize. Not the least of his triumphs was that he managed to do this on the thirsty island where he grew up. It was on Antigua, on the hill by the Ding-a-Ding Nook, that Walter became the mighty artist he was meant to be. But the place where he proved he could do so, to himself and to his people, was the lush island of Dominica, where he didn’t just scale Mount Olympus but built it. ♦

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is Pioneer Works’ Director of Publishing and co-editor-in-chief of 

The World Frank Walter Made

The following is an excerpt from Erica Ehrenberg’s collection in progress, tentatively titled 

In it I scaled mountains, not on foot but in the funicular, then on the glacier on foot, wearing plastic sunglasses, smelling of the interior of the car. In the interior of the car—after hours with the heat sputtering man made weather, wearing it all the time, on the backseat sometimes sleeping.

It could go from a covering for the body to being stuffed into itself to become a small and weightless sack. I liked how I felt like a boy in it. And feeling like a boy in it I also felt hot to men. Because there are times in this life when there is a slippage between the desire to have what you are attracted to and the desire to become it.

The opposite of seduction, the pressure to attract—I wanted to burrow straight into the place where the inexact penis sat hidden in the off hours but where it wouldn’t see me. The penis angling everything, the rope in the hands, angling the hands.

I liked daydreaming in the K-way all wrapped up in industrial strength apocryphally waterproof fabric, the sound of the synthetic fibers brushing against my head when I had the hood on, more than a head cover, a helmet of sound echoing back to me the waft of my own body as the fabric reflected my sweat back to my skin. It extended my presence not only into the outer edge of the fabric but more importantly into that gap between like a layer of trapped breath where I craved myself.

I had this fanny pack style thing to put on that covered my shame like a tent and trapped it where it could become aggressive. I had it for stepping out onto the glacier whose air-eating holes could have convinced me with their obliterating power to close desire forever, but instead shored it up, tamped it in, stuffed me up in my swishing little hiding place.

One day in the middle of winter, I went for a walk on the famous glacier, lost my way in a crevice during an unexpected snowfall, passed out, and had a strange vision. A very small man, who though small, was proportional, appeared and said while sliding his hand under my neck, “turn so I can cradle your head.” I did as he said, and my head clicked into place and fit into his hand the way the heads of plastic toys I had as a child snapped into their plastic helmets. I felt an unease rise in my bloodstream, a cold and sour bubbling. “I’m going to give you the secret of this glacier,” he said, “but it will not be information that you can repeat or remember,” and my body split open into two half-chambers.

An echo pushed up and down through the tunnel I had created. It had no starting place and no end but made a forceful column that seemed to both dig down into the earth and up into the sky. My tongue was covered in a film of moss, but where was my tongue? It had no location, it was only a sensation like a memory of having a body. The moss marked the outline of a remembered shape I once took, and my eyes pushed through the cavern wall with vision that cut through the layers of the rock.

I saw crumbling orange clusters and white petals like coral growing in a line, and I felt these petals were growing out of my face the way mushrooms grow like shelves on trees. My body was the rock cracked in two by the ice. My mind was the space in between, a shapeless substance, loose, except for the hand of the man holding it up. It beckoned further and further into the slit that did not end and pulled in single flakes of snow that went down softly and reluctantly. Then the glacier as a space seen through a person came back to me. The hand of the man spread over me like the skin of my face and body, giving me back a form, which lets only certain things be seen.

The ocean next to our house isn’t fixed in its bed. Because our land and air are so wet, the water is slick and can’t control its movements. The waning waves, sliding down from the shore after high tide are jealous of the birds that sink their tiny feet into the glistening sand. The body of the bird is so distinct—it hears the rumblings of a storm or an animal wriggle in its tunnel, and turns its head in the direction of these movements, contained enough to stop moving, still enough to turn and see. By what force is the water willed? Except in delineated coves, it has no starting place, but a wish to be guided by the moon with care and not indifference—the possibility of giving itself in pieces to the stars, total madness. ♦

Erica Ehrenberg’s work has appeared in 

. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Erica Ehrenberg: The End of Pettiness

Audre Lorde, who was born in 1934 in New York City to Caribbean parents, became one of the foremost Black feminist writers and activists of the twentieth century. In the thirty years since her passing, her work—ranging from prose to poetry, autobiography to fiction, political to erotic—has only grown in resonance. On May 15th, 1970, aged 36, Lorde read a collection of her poems at the storied 

, where they were recorded and archived for Harvard’s 

. Many of the poems she chose to read speak of hunger and burning: the Lorde of these recordings was a poet and a woman at a crossroads, on her way to becoming the “Black lesbian feminist warrior poet mother” we know, learning how to negotiate, with language, a world where the stakes were always high.

Today, an LP of Lorde’s recording is out from 

. We’re pleased to present an audio excerpt from the record here, along with an essay by Carl Phillips, the acclaimed poet and one of Lorde’s most learned admirers, that he contributed to its liner notes.

Until listening to this recording, I’d never heard Audre Lorde’s speaking voice. I don’t think I had any particular preconceptions of how she’d sound. I just hoped she wouldn’t disappoint me the way so many of my poetry idols have, once I’ve heard them read; it’s amazing how many poets seem unable to read their own work well, by which I mean with a confidence that doesn’t shun humility, and with a persuasiveness that avoids sounding pedantic.

Confident and persuasive from the start, Lorde doesn’t disappoint. What I was most immediately struck by, though, was the exactness of phrasing Lorde gives to each word, something that goes beyond mere enunciation—this reading is like a master class in elocution. And as it turns out, this isn’t just a style that Lorde adopts when reading her poems; she sounds the same when speaking casually in between the poems. I don’t want to make too much of what quite likely was just how Lorde grew up speaking, instinctively. But in the context of this reading, and of Lorde’s body of work, I hear a very deliberate insistence on precision—precision as the main weapon with which to negotiate a world where the stakes—politically, bodily, in love and in war—are always decisively high. Michael Palmer has spoken of words as a sacrament to be handled accordingly with great care. For Lorde, it’s as if great care were necessary, yes, but more because, for her, language is not so much sacred as explosive: I am making something dangerous here, Lorde seems to say, I could do great damage with what I make; I could destroy myself, if careless, in the course of making.

How to get at what’s essential, at the essence—of ourselves, of those whom we love, of a society that seems reluctant, at best, to include all of us? “I am trying to tell this without art or embellishment,” Lorde says in “Blood Birth.” The poems display great artistry, of course. But it’s also the case that, as with how she reads, what for Lorde defines artistry is a spareness, an exactness, an avoidance of overcrowding a poem with images; Lorde knows the single right image is much more powerful than several less carefully chosen ones. She also understands the potential (the tendency?) of images, when brought together, to work in unison as camouflage—form that can distract from the substance behind it. It’s an odd conundrum. The work of a poet is to gather words and imagery together to convey a particular meaning or set of meanings. But the imperative that goes with that is to recognize how words, like imagery, can deceive us when brought together. And Lorde suggests, even in how she’s arranged her set of poems for this recording, that this deception has the potential to occur in contexts that straddle public and private. It seems very purposeful how, right after a sequence of overtly ‘political’ poems – “The American Cancer Society…,” “Sewerplant Grows in Harlem…,” and “A Ballad of Black Childhood”—Lorde casually announces that the next three poems “are love poems.” The love poems which are then followed by “Conversations in Crisis,” where she could as easily be addressing a lover or a corporation when she distinguishes her addressee’s words from “the false heat in the voice,” a distinction that alerts her to the power of words to deceive: this is what marketing knows, this is what those whom we trust most intimately also know—what we ourselves know. Who of us hasn’t betrayed someone, even if incidentally, even if it’s ourselves we betrayed?

“Take my word for jewel”—that’s how Lorde, aloud and on the page, delivers each word, with a consciousness of any word’s value, and of its powers both to destroy and to illuminate. “Some words/Bedevil me.” Love is a word, too:

I am black because I come from the earth’s inside

Take my word for jewel in your open light.

For me, these lines say everything about Lorde’s gift to American letters, namely, her commitment to the poet’s responsibility to look honestly, truthfully, at the worlds around and within us, to find the essence of human interiority—“the total black, being spoken/From the earth’s inside”—and to understand it through the clarity of open light, “another kind of open.” We have everything to lose—and, being mortal, we inevitably eventually lose it. All the more reason to take the full measure and value of what we have—this life—and to honor it by giving voice to each flashing aspect of it, word by word, jewel by jewel. Precision in this context becomes more than strategy. It’s an act of rescue—a choice. It’s an act of love. 

—Carl Phillips, August 2022, Saint Louis MO ♦

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a writer and activist who authored over 18 volumes of poetry and prose. Carl Phillips is a writer and poet whose most recent collection, 

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde: Take My Word for Jewel

forthcoming book of poetry. It will be featured, in part, within 

's first print issue, launching during the 

An exemplary chair marrying wicker and iron. Modern-spirited—its support crisp, crisscrossing rods. The seat’s materials extracted from and best suited for lounging anywhere in the vast region
between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. As if designed for dream recollection, it was sold to me by Déjà Vu and later placed for optimal vantage. I take my seat and gain a view of the wilderness. It all comes back to me then. I teach at an art school that has relocated to Acapulco. I’ve arrived to run a couple of workshops on repetition. Faculty have transplanted their New England homes to this port city well past its golden era. Only the tents don’t clash with the architecture. Under one of them, a group of students in prairie dresses talk ecstatically about L’s divination workshop. How do coming events cast their shadows? Sunlight, grasses, breeze. Skin-clinging heat in the form of humidity. Horse-drawn carriages go by. Where are the palm trees? We are not in Appalachia. One of the artists keeps calling out to me by the wrong names: Clara, Lucía, nearly synonymous with lucidity. I’m off to another dream.

My void is called my sister, said the voice I didn’t have. Morning thoughts with the consistency of music. A sustained undoneness. Confession distorted, as if in translation. Ions, eons, and other easily confused words. Reduplication or the erotics of indeterminateness, rendered as a series of folds. In a single sentence, such as: "Synapses are plastic.” 

 A day’s third devoted to shedding dead cells. Analysis, all memory.


Other instances include: “The more a patch of grass is trampled, the clearer the path becomes. A memory of walking is being created." Also wingding, flimflam, back-to-back. When asked what transpired, she heard herself blurt out: “I am not a revenant!”

Sitting at the edge of the bench, with a partial view of the screen unless I make an effort to see the whole picture. When I do, someone complains that I’m blocking the view. J, sitting in the audience, starts blasting incomprehensible pronouncements. He’s mocking lawmakers who’ve just passed an outrageous bill in congress. Expanded cinema. The film is also a book. A young bed-ridden woman seeks her true identity. She finds it at the end, but the knowledge makes all that came before acquire a different meaning. We go back to the beginning. On second read, we realize it’s her twin who’s discovered her identity. The sisters have been next to each other the whole time. One is clothed and the other one is naked. I turn to the audience and tell them that poetry is law. Explain yourself, someone demands. We owe our feelings, don’t we, I ask. The audience begins to disperse; a tourist who’s announced he’s lodging at the Seasons hotel watches me put my boots back on after I wipe my feet clean. The floor is full of dirt. The last scene is a close up of feet. One twin is the right foot, the other is left.

Two editions of a nonexistent book. A probable book in which New York School poets discuss the composition of their works. I’m participating in the launch and have travelled with a group to a city reminiscent of Tokyo. We’re trying to find the venue and enter the wrong building. The more we get lost, the less I remember what I’d planned to say. A asks me to go fetch her copy of the book, which she forgot at the hotel. I get even more lost but manage to locate it. Her copy includes a facsimile of her journals. I can’t find the pages I’d earmarked in my own copy of the second edition. I walk into the auditorium a half hour late carrying a giant, filthy vat in each hand which I proceed to hide behind velvet curtains. 

The poets are seated at a picnic table onstage and there’s a Ouija board on the table. M is there. The other A is there too. She tells me to sit on the bench across from her. I would prefer not to: if I want to face the audience, I’d have to turn my back to the other panelists. Also there, D and G with her new boyfriend, though it’s not G, it’s B. I’m still sore that she lied to me. I’m trapped onstage and have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. I am relieved when the moderator begins querying us about our own creative processes. There are two planes: one exterior and one interior. The first requires that your antennas are out, that you allow yourself to be guided by whatever is happening outside. The interior one, on the other hand, is like a square by Josef Albers inside another square that is the exterior of the inner interior. I lose my train of thought but the moderator doesn’t notice. Her fingers are gliding on the Ouija board.

Identical tear marks in the same spot of the sky on consecutive days. Rows of dolphins propel themselves in the sound. I am with a group of animated, highly sociable mammals. To go from one part of town to another, both equidistant from the shore, we must walk on the beach. No one but me sees them dipping in and out of the water, fins and arched backs glistening off in the distance. Mirrored processions, unalike speeds.

A pit-bull lunges toward us on the trail. Its equally thick-set owner makes half-assed attempts at calling it back. He was already having a hard time controlling it when they were approaching the pond, just as we’d turned around to return to the trail head. I see flashes of torn skin and oozing blood in my mind’s eye. B uses the oversize umbrella he’s been lugging as a shield to shoo away the dog. It stops. Its owner struggles to catch up to it. Once he does, he fastens a leash onto its collar. Adrenaline rushes as it starts to pour. We quicken our step. A few minutes later, we hear shouts from behind once more. I’m shaking. There’s the dog again, though this time it moves toward us with an amicable gait. A kid catches up to him, fastens a leash onto its collar. A different dog. A retriever or lab, also honey-colored.

Probably a Maga guy. Fucking asshole. Can’t wait to see the car he’s driving.

We pass a tree on whose bare branch someone put a lost glove, giving the finger.

At the parking lot, there’s a Vibe just like ours next to our car. The bald eagle decorating the hood is painted flamingo pink. From the mirror hang beads ending in a heart charm. The dashboard is covered in ornaments: fuzz balls in bright colors and a monarch butterfly. A stack of flags rests on the backseat.

I repeat the poem in Spanish a number of times so I can transcribe it upon waking. It’s so simple I can’t possibly forget it. Later a search takes me to the sole extant recording of Alejandra Pizarnik’s voice. She reads a poem by Arturo Carrera whose title translates to “Written with a Nyctograph.” 

The phrase “future historian of feelings” in another notebook. 

. Only the translator might be able to decode them according to the cathartic method. I am given a book of hers wrapped in kraft paper. No trace of the poem, just a password in gift form.

We are staying at a hotel reminiscent of the one in “Last Year in Marienbad” with our friends. He leaves me a coded message suggesting that we meet on our own, without our spouses. I am excited by his proposition and show up at the room at the end of a long corridor at the arranged time. His wife opens the door and instantly realizes what’s happening. On my way there, I was planning to call things off. Not worth it, I was going to say. We’d risk ruining our friendship forever. But it’s too late. His wife thinks the worse has already happened. I assure her there’s nothing going on between us, but everything I say makes matters worse. She’s crying. I’m crying. He arrives, mortified. B arrives. His wife delivers the news to him, delivers the news to B. Misunderstandings and projections are already causing irreparable damage. It’s a nightmare. A telenovela. No comedy of errors. I am overcome by guilt and despair. I should've known better. Something about his paintings had always suggested this kind of imbroglio to me. He gets on his knees and apologizes to the three of us. 

We decide to take the poodle for a walk around the hotel and talk things out. As we’re doing that, the grounds rotate 180 degrees. I dream I wake up horrified at my behavior, fall asleep again, and begin the same dream again, but with an entirely different orientation. It dawns on me: a novel’s perfect structure.  ♦

Mónica de la Torre is the author of six books of poetry, the latest being

. She is the recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant. She teaches at Brooklyn College.

Mónica de la Torre: Dream Caravan Dream

Pippa Garner has been doing things the wrong way for a long time. She’s engineered a car that drives backwards; designed a dramatically cropped, gray sport coat for warm weather; invented objects that don’t make any sense, like a broom combined with a boombox; and customized hundreds of T-shirts that brand their wearers a “creep magnet” or “bad in bed.” In each instance Garner has made the marketplace monstrous, and turned the norms of American domesticity inside-out. She made things queer when queer was contentious.

This fall, Pioneer Works Press has partnered with Art Omi to publish 

, a 352-page book that spans the five-decade career of a woman who has made it impossible to look away. The book is full of unseen photographs and writings by Garner and her admirers, tender and punchy, and serve as anecdotes for those for whom reinvention is survival. In an age where identities are mined and commodified, Garner has been a mirror whose work magnifies our deepest insecurities to show us that the best way forward involves making fun of ourselves. The following is a collection of never-before published writings by Pippa herself—excerpted from the volume 

As an artist and humorist with a penchant for technological satire, I’ve “reinvented” mass-produced artifacts to create items of tempting appeal but dubious value, as in my books: THE BETTER LIVING CATALOG and UTOPIA ... OR BUST! Recently I became a product of my own juxtaposeurial tendencies by undergoing sex-change surgery. After a half-century as a competent hetero male, I committed gendercide and was reissued as a “man maid” postmenopausal adolescent female. I have realized my ultimate art goal: to “be” one of my own ideas. I feel like my brain is the remote controller for an animated toy (my body) and it can’t wait to try her out in each new situation.

My next objective: A legal self-marriage (masturmony?)

I have no memory of any inward struggle over whether or not to take female hormones. The idea presented itself and seemed absolutely right. It was as if any ambiguity had been worked out on a subconscious level and by the time it came to the surface, all was clear. It was just a matter of procedure—how does one go about such a thing? Naturally, I went to the doctors, three of them, all of whom thought I was crazy or stupid or both. I also sent for a pamphlet titled “Hormones and me,” which I saw advertised in a magazine. This proved to be amateurishly produced and vague, but contained a certain amount of information. I did not see myself as a transvestite or a potential transsexual, I just knew somehow that my maleness had run into trouble. I spoke to no one about this. Nancy was the only possible person I might have confided in, but I couldn’t overcome the need to play a male role with her, even if I played it badly. She knew I was going through a hard time and told me later how worried she had been, but there was nothing she could do. I began approaching transvestite street hookers and offering to pay them for information. After several false starts, I met Kellie, a sad but very nice transsexual who agreed, for a fee, to sit at a bus stop and brief me on the use of hormones. It was through her that I found the black market source for female hormones that I have used for the last five years. After that night, which included a demonstration of the use of the syringe, in her motel room, I never saw her again. The second mirage.

I feel like my brain is the remote controller for an animated toy (my body) and it can’t wait to try her out in each new situation.

I was incredibly elated at having accomplished this strange mission. I became adept at giving myself the twice weekly injections in a short time. All I hoped for initially was that my breasts would develop. I anticipated no other changes. After several weeks I noticed a kind of itching sensation around my nipples accompanied by a slight swelling. Within a couple of months my skin had softened enough to draw a few compliments but the real change was psychological. All of my complex frustrations ranging from my economic failure to my convoluted feelings about women began to dissipate. My sexual feelings opened up into a wonderful sensuality. In short, I became, in the space of a few short weeks, a new person. Nancy was the eye witness and couldn’t believe what was happening. (She didn’t know about the hormones for the first six months. By then, my breast development, although slight, was enough to give me away.) I began to feel that my pre-hormone life was that of another person. I had stepped out of that skin and was, at age forty-five, beginning again. I was discreet about revealing any of this—it was illegal—but once the word got out I took every opportunity to promote what I thought was a revelation of major proportions. The problems of the world could be summed up in one notion: too much maleness. Eventually, nature would take care of this, but in the meantime, man could take evolution into his own hands and achieve Utopia through hormone balancing. I have a file of the pages of notes I made during this initial “over-reaction” period. I will get them out someday.

There may be an aspect of truth in these first thoughts but in looking back—it’s been five years—I believe I was using these generalizations to mask the true nature of what was happening to me. I had awakened the female within me, given her the kiss of life, as it were, but was denying her the strength of her character. Of course, these things take time and it is interesting to me that I went through this virtually alone. What would have happened under guidance, I can’t guess. I think most people regarded this as another Garner “crazy stunt,” along with my Backwards Car and other notorious projects. People in LA tend to be blasé and cynical—they’ve seen it all. Most of my lecturing fell on disinterested ears. The bottom line was ... “Did it make any money?” So I remained very much on the far periphery of the local scene. I wasn’t ostracized, I just wasn’t included. It was still primarily the money thing.

I had acquired two very loving Persian cats and they covered a great deal of my need for friendship. Nancy was going through troubles of her own, but had achieved great recognition as a painter. We remained soulmates. I was doing good work (even if I wasn’t getting paid for it) and things were actually pretty good. The only real problem, and it was becoming a big one, was LA itself. I had been there a long time, twenty-five years off and on, and I’d seen it go from what amounted to a sprawling small town, full of eccentricity and absurdity, to a tough, self-centered, and humor-less megacity, overpopulated and ugly. I knew I should get out but I felt stuck there, partially because of my bond with Nancy, and the fact that I didn’t want to leave her there alone.

And then one of my little cats, the most loving creature I have ever known, was killed in Wilshire Blvd. What I went through when I found her little body I wouldn’t be able to describe. I was destroyed. I felt like I had died with her. I cried for days and even now I can’t talk about it. My father had died the year before and although I was sad, my feelings were abstract. When I lost my little cat, it broke my heart. I knew then I had to leave, as soon as possible.

I had awakened the female within me, given her the kiss of life, as it were, but was denying her the strength of her character.

There was no question where I would go. I would return to Mill Valley. It was the antithesis of LA and seemed like the ultimate vision of paradise. My mother had moved to Sausalito and was willing to help me meet some of the costs of moving to a more expensive place. I left in October 1990, just in time for Halloween in San Francisco, vowing never to return to LA again (except briefly, for a lot of money, under highly professional circumstances). I’ve spent an idyllic year and a quarter here in my rustic flat, the bottom of an old house on a quiet tree-lined street. I now have four cats—three from Persian Cat Rescue in Livermore, a shelter for abused and abandoned Persians—and one of my cats from LA: a friend of eight years. Some of my high school acquaintances still live here but we have little in common at this stage. My mother moved to Mill Valley a few months ago and I get together with her once or twice a week. Our relationship is good at times, testy at others. I have mentioned my gender ambiguity a couple of times but I don’t think it sank in. Her current project is to “find herself” after forty-nine years of marriage.

The last thing I want to do is confuse the issue by introducing something she would undoubtedly find bizarre. I have reinstated my most important personal routines such as the gym, which, to save time and money, I built into my apartment, and regular attendance (twice a week) at a dance club. During the past months I have taken the change of environment as an opportunity to experiment with painting and forms of expression that I never would have tried “down there.” It was satisfying and successful but for the new year I decided to go all out for a commercial success, at last. I am working on a new book which will be styled after my first book (the one that got away) but I am going to profit from my mistakes and make this one work. I started ’92 with a strong sense of impending personal evolution. Things are moving. ♦

Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELF

We learned the word
for holiday. We went around
the room each naming one.
I said Chinese New Year.
Someone said Halloween.
Then someone said hayrides
at the pumpkin patch
and I imagined myself
on the back of a truck
at dusk, a little drunk
and laughing, knocking
into the side of the wagon
as it swung around
bales of hay. Gold filaments
in the sky like rain.
Who is this small child
at my side? I look at her,
intently because she looks
like me, then at the man
next to her whom I no longer
know. Moonlight binds
our hands in a straight line
from heaven to Earth.
Someone says Thanksgiving.
Someone says Christmas.
Christmas with your parents,
Easter with your friends,
says the teacher. I have friends
I don't spend Easter with,
parents who don't know
my name. I'd never dreamed
of a family before, of a lover
and a child in the same scene.

La Sagra

First we installed a tall white cabinet
and filled it with books, records, a cracked vase
we found in Crete.
You said you liked things the way
I did. So did I.
Quickly we added a table, chairs, lamps, then a desk until
there was no more room for a sofa, but I supposed
we weren't sofa people anyway.
You agreed. I took your hand
as we stood on the curb and watched the sky
turn from blue to black.

In that certain light I can see again
all the base configurations we attempted
as we tried to think our way out of this
and then that, one lightbulb burning out after another
until it was noon again.

Neither of us knew what to do,
so we sold the cabinet
and bought a sofa. It's been months now
and still the books lie open on the wooden floor,
the pages sailing out like moths
in the dark.

Arrangements

Because it was April, the tree bore fruit.
I moved picture frames from room to room,
then back until the sun came up.
I closed my eyes and counted to five, then
it was June and the street was littered with apples.
We stack some squares and call this a house.
Celery, milk, bread, and cheese.
Summer fades into fall.
An old woman stops me to ask the time.
I like when old women are like Chinese almanacs.
I don't tell my mother about any of this.
I watch myself from a tree a little longer,
rustle the leaves until you look.

Lullaby

I have no housecat, no TV, no lover
I can touch. I sing a song
in a house inside my head and imagine
children sitting around me,
watching in the dark.

Some nights I'm scared
I won't be able to sing.
No song but the whir of a fan
half-circling in the bedroom corner
where in my dreams

I’m in a valley looking up at the sky,
alien angles of a desert sunset
sparkling violet and bright green,
the line between that world
and this one invisible as an ending
where pain would be not punishment
but reprieve.

I have not been visible now for a while.

I slipped between the hours, barely touching 
the surface of my life.

Time chased me, passing audibly
in the winter. Scratch of an ice skate
circling over the neon buzz

of the Hy-Vee. I was trailed
by a beer can in a lake,
shadow of a plane over cornfields,
true blue beauty

of a midwestern sunset, landlocked
and unburdened by freedom.

Reeds swaying on the bank
as though it were some other place.

The Stenographer

Adrienne Chung's poetry and prose have appeared in 

, and elsewhere. The following poems are from her debut collection, 

 out this week from Penguin Random House.

Adrienne Chung: Arrangements

It’s strange to remember the moment you first heard the word “pandemic.” I mean, now that the word is as familiar to us as our own names. I remember it as a falling feeling, one of profound unreality, like the tumble Alice takes down that rabbit hole. Just when you thought you couldn’t fall any further, you kept going. Most of us just fell. But if you were like Alice—or like Ana Prvački—after a while, you were able not only to fall but to notice things as you fell. Your own body. The things around you. Words and their meanings. The long, bewitching ears of the white rabbit himself!

During the pandemic, objects shimmered and vibrated, mostly because in your fugue state, you were often to be found sitting around just staring at them, paying them more attention than you ever had in your life. You’d never known your home so intimately, nor been so familiar with the various items inside it. Frying pan. Slippers. Pillow. Bath. The borderline between the animate and inanimate became indistinct, like Albrecht Dürer’s famous squirming pillows. Things spoke to you. And if you happened to be living alone, well, more often than not, you spoke back.

With less to look at, we looked intently. And when you went outside on your regulation walk, if there was sun, then it was the sunniest sun ever seen, and if there was rain, every drop was outlined and specific. It was possible to get to the point where you could identify different types of dew. The particular became the universal. A squirrel became “wildlife.” A pine tree became “nature.” The horizon became very good for your nervous system. Also: the sky. Also: any view of mountains or hills. Of course, you were terribly nervous and all the time. And when you weren’t nervous, you were: nauseous, anxious, angry, fearful, sad, and desperate. You languished!

Meanwhile, at the kitchen table, “Hybrid learning” led to hybrid-children who could pretend to be attending their Zoom lessons while simultaneously texting, TikToking, or making a study of the acrobatic squirrel walking the tightrope of the laundry line. The hybrid-children’s parents swore to Jeff Bezos and upon all things unholy that they were never, ever going to use Amazon again—but then you went and used Amazon again, didn’t you? Yes, you did. Me too. If only because the arrival of a box could break up a day:

You opened the door in dressing gown and slippers and realized that you had just ordered a real living person to come to your door in the middle of a pandemic to bring you something you really didn’t need, wrapped up in packaging that will last forever. Then you swore never to do it again. The earth is top-heavy because of people like us.

Nature was good for our nervous systems, but even in nature, there were few places for the mind to rest. We were having hell for breakfast, every day, and then more hell for lunch and dinner, too, and if you stepped outside to take some pleasure in nature—in a horizon or a hill or the shoreline or the sky itself—a moment later you remembered that nature, too, had a virus, a virus called humans, and it was because of all us that the bees were dying and the earth was top-heavy, for far too many of us at the top were hoarding resources while the bottom half suffered. We tried to burn the shame and sadness of all this like calories, undertaking many new hobbies and fitness goals and community projects, although more often, we languished and we marinated. Imaginary scenarios were constantly on our minds, and the only thing we could imagine was apocalypse.

But! The mind is dexterous and can make of anything a metaphor, make of anything a simile. A woman can see herself in the curves of a pepper grinder or the angular gestures of a coffee pot. A woman might lose all sense of her own citified modern reality, seeing herself in a bowl of primal ooze or in the ancient nobbled fertility statues archaeologists sometimes dig out of the earth. Some days were for making art. Others for hiding under a duvet and despairing. But whatever we did, we knew we were like juvenile swans, that is, in a period of radical becoming. Nobody knew what they would be like at the end of it all. (If it ever ended. If it has ended.) But everybody knew they would never be the same again. I wish I’d had Ana Prvački’s exquisite series of existential watercolors with me during it all, when my nervous system was utterly broken and I didn’t know which way was up... in that long, dark, seemingly bottomless hole. Whispering in my ear like a homeopathic sea shell:

You are going to be ok
This too shall pass
I am here for you
We are all in this together ♦

This text has been excerpted from its form in the publication 

 with an essay by Zadie Smith, published by 

Zadie Smith is the author, most recently, of 

. The following is excerpted from her essay for Ana Prvački's 

, out this week in the U.S. from Sternberg Press.

Zadie Smith: Flowering Under Stress

Under I am letting go
of nighttime: soothing sweat
dismissed as chlorine:

in this place:
majestic noun pouring
over the pool.

I hear no one: no
little rattles: no cued-up laughter:
no acuteness: no victories:
swallowed: surrounded.

To the Rock on My Desk

To the Rock on My Desk

Klee's World

Caesar-Song

The Painter and the Fascist