Issue 1.4 Archives - LIBER Review

1.4 On the Cover

Charis Caputo

Donna the chimp. Photo by Victoria Horner. Donna is a biologically female chimpanzee who exhibits many traits associated with her male counterparts; she likes to wrestle, walks with a “swagger,” and can erect her body hair. In Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, Frans de Waal describes Donna as “a largely asexual gender nonconforming individual.” But why should we care? As S.C. Cornell writes in her thoughtful critique of zoological essentialism (pp. 36–39),

Poetry Comment

Katha Pollitt

Editor’s Letter

Jennifer Baumgardner

Anne Heche, who died suddenly in August, was seventeen in 1987, when she began playing the twins Marley and Vicky on Another World, my favorite soap. Marley was a kindly drip in mauve Ann Taylor suits and a pained smile. Vicky, the conniver, had bouncy hair and dressed like Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease. Even in comas after separate car accidents, Marley was a pill and Vicky was the draw. A decade later,

Radical Form: On Faith Ringgold and Suzanne Lacy

Jillian Steinhauer

Faith Ringgold: American People, 2022. Exhibition view. New Museum, New York. Photo by Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum. © Faith Ringgold/ARS. One day, in the summer of 1972, Faith Ringgold visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. As an artist living in New York City, Ringgold had been making powerfully expressive figurative paintings about race in the United States for just under a decade —works like American People Series #20: Die (1967), a twelve-foot-long mural that depicts

My So-Called Undocumented MFA Life

Aline Mello

All images from Presença: We Are Here, a series of embroidered 16 x 20-inch photographs. Aline Mello, 2022. IT’S SUMMER BREAK after the first year of my MFA at Ohio State. I am living with my stepfather and mother in their house about thirty minutes outside Atlanta. I am thirty-three, but when I’m at Mamãe’s house, I revert to thirteen. When I cook something, she sucks in air through her teeth. You made that this

Travel Channel

Laurie Stone

Anthony Bourdain (far left), c. 1980. This year, the ticks in Hudson are the size of the head of a pin. You look at them with amazement they can be that small. The man I live with examines a tiny black dot I show him, and we go upstairs to get tweezers. He holds my arm under a bright light and grabs the critter, pulling up firmly but not too fast. I can see the

Lesser Bad Girls of the Nineties: TV Edition

Kait Heacock

Illustration by Mayra Tuncel. 1. Girls Gone Wild I saw you girls incessantly, a parade of commercials during late-night television. Seeing the text bar reading all real covering your nipples on the DVD covers always made me feel guilty, implicated in your antics, even though I was only trying to watch Comedy Central. You college girls. Say you’re on spring break, and next thing you know, Joe Francis is buying you shots and saying you

Estranged: Writing Friendship’s Dark Places

Devanshi Khetarpal

Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco in My Brilliant Friend, season 2. Courtesy of HBO. Sometimes friendships survive because of the things we don’t say. A few weeks ago, I was walking with a fellow writer down a short trail in Bread Loaf, Vermont, when our conversation turned to our shared love for Elena Ferrante. She told me, after some hesitation, that reading the Neapolitan Novels had left her feeling almost “sick” and “injured,” that the

Soft Bodies

Anna Godbersen

Illustration by Mayra Tuncel. Afterward, Lila felt washed clean. Her face was as bare of makeup as a child’s and her insides had a drained, weightless quality, as though wrung of excess moisture. The hospital bed was stacked with so many pillows, pads, and blankets, it was as though she were floating just slightly above the furniture. The pale gray light also had an aura of suspension. It could have signified morning, afternoon, or evening.

‘Summer Field’ and ‘One Swan’

Amber Flora Thomas

Summer Field Probably I made the sag in the barbwire where anyone could get through to the field, summers after the rancher moved the sheep off to better grazing. I got there when the wild rye and brome was high and the crickets swung too heavy for the yellow fray, not caring when their catapult levered my arms and chest. I collapsed on the dry stocks that gave way to my . . . RESTRICTED

Issue 1.4