Issue 1.5 Archives - LIBER Review

1.5 On the Cover

Charis Caputo

On the cover: Machine Dazzle, Times Square, 2008 By Eileen Keane Machine Dazzle (née Matthew Flower, b. 1972) is performance artist and self-taught costume designer known for his wild inventions and for whom street is stage. Elissa Auther, who curated Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle, on view through February 2023 at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, says Machine’s “queer bricolage self-consciously makes display out of cast-offs that he cobbles together into a culture

Poetry Comment

Katha Pollitt

The Virgin Mary is surely the most written, painted, sculpted, and sung-about woman in Western history, but she appears in just a few passages in the Bible—always in the context of her more famous son. Did she have more children? Did she and Joseph love each other? What did her neighbors think of her (“That Mary—she thinks she’s so special!”)? Christian tradition frames her as the perfect, sinless woman, but what does that mean, exactly?

Editor’s Letter

Jennifer Baumgardner

Almost sixty years ago, a girl at the University of Chicago was pregnant and suicidal. Her brother begged another student (a member of CORE and SDS) to find an abortion provider. The student “hadn’t thought about the issue before” but approached this as a good deed and found a doctor. Word traveled, and soon the student was swamped with calls from desperate women. To retain privacy and stay out of jail, she told callers to

Nice White Ladies

Anastasia Higginbotham

WOMEN AND HONOR: Some Notes on Lying, an immense work of fourteen pages by the lesbian poet and white feminist Adrienne Rich, begins with a clarification in parentheses at the top of page one: “These notes are concerned with relationships between and among women.” Drawn from remarks Rich made at a writers workshop in 1975, Women and Honor was published two years later by Pittsburgh-based press Motheroot (RIP). My copy from Cleis Press was given

Cut: On Yoko Ono and Feminist Art

Ellen Papazian

Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall, New York, 1965. ⓒ Yoko Ono. Photo: Minoru Niizuma. YOKO ONO SELF-PUBLISHED Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings in Tokyo in 1964. In 1970, this visionary work of conceptual art was published in the US. Ono’s “instructions” were a radical approach to art because they centralized the participant in the work to manifest the piece, whether the artist was present or not. Some of the instructions

Ring

Laurie Stone

The other night, we visited the South Street Seaport, where a branch of the McNally Jackson bookstore is located. On the pier, regular water cost six dollars and everyone was the age of the horizon. They looked beautiful in Bermuda shorts, walking dogs. At the event, I read a little from my new book and talked about freedom in front of the assembled group with the writer Vince Passaro. A man I had not seen

Forgiveness

LaToya Council

In the fall of 2021, I ran into my ex-best friend at Trader Joe’s. I was surprised to see her; I had moved back to Los Angeles and she still lived on the East Coast. We’d met as undergrads at Spelman College and, while I was in graduate school, I’d lived briefly with her and her husband, but we hadn’t spoken for more than a year. I was pushing my cart through the dairy section,

House of Uncommon Birds

Emma Bushmann

Illustrations by Maya Tuncel The July that Woody Allen died was the July I drove off the cliff and lived. Woozy on Vicodin, I said to the nurse, “Thank god he’s finally kicked it.” The hospital TV did not show his most recent self, withered and bent as if against a constant wind, but his young, first-in-love face. When I went off the cliff I thought, This car is going to be totally totaled. I

See Jane Start a Fire: An Interview With Phyllis Nagy

Honor Moore

Sheila Smith, Martha Scott, and Diane Stevens, arrested in a 1972 raid of the underground abortion service Jane. After Patricia Highsmith’s death in 1995, her friend, playwright and filmmaker Phyllis Nagy, committed to adapting The Price of Salt for film. Nagy expected homophobic resistance—Highsmith herself used a pseudonym when she published this classic lesbian love story—but the real barrier to financing was that it starred two women. Nagy kept the faith and, a mere twenty

The Bubble: An Interview With A.M. Homes

Jennifer Baumgardner

A.M. Homes. Photo by Marie Sanford. When A. M. Homes was growing up in Washington, D.C., her teachers were skeptical that she’d successfully write a check, much less a book. She dropped out of high school and eventually found herself at Sarah Lawrence, where she met Grace Paley. Homes’s books—The Safety of Objects (1990), The End of Alice (1996), and Music for Torching (1999), among others—have been translated into twenty-two languages, adapted for film and

Issue 1.5