Issue 2.1 Archives - LIBER Review

2.1 On the Cover

The Egocircus Collective

In the spring of 2020, we were a class called “Egocircus, a Workshop in Collaboration.” Then of course we became a Zoom class. For some reason, the class did not end but became a virtual laboratory for artmaking, choreography, video, jokes, gossip, philosophy. We got confused doing Share Screen + Share Computer Audio. We did things we were not very good at—sometimes together, sometimes with our future selves. We revised toward friendship, floating in different

Poetry Comment

Katha Pollitt

THIS ISSUE BRINGS together two poets we were thrilled to publish in the Women’s Review of Books, and they couldn’t be more different. Linda Bamber infuses her poems with a Buddhist sense of detachment—or rather, the hope of detachment, which life so often defeats. In “Nirvana,” she’s embroiled in the comedy of dailiness: a missing can opener, a visit from the plumber, computer problems, friendship problems, just . . . problems! Nirvana has never seemed

Editor’s Letter

Jennifer Baumgardner

OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK, I watched all twenty-four episodes of the anime Parasyte: The Maxim (2014–2015). Big picture, it reframes the relationships of hosts, parasites, and invasive species in perceptive and disturbing ways. Do all living things have a right to life? Is humanity the invasive species of earth? Narratively, Shinichi, age seventeen, is partially infected by a murderous corkscrew cyclops and has to learn to live with “Migi” (his literal right hand, now quite maternal,

Abject d’Art

Alexander Bondoc

DURING THE QUARANTINE phase of the pandemic, New York City was deathly quiet. In this silence, I began to discover my own genderqueerness, which manifested by way of playing with clothing, adjusting the height of my heels, and picking up nail art. Two years later, I’m still playing around with nail art, but the experiment has blossomed into a research-based art praxis connecting the history of nail art to queer theory and phenomenology. I’ve leaned

Revisiting the Parental Horror Film

Adam Carston

It’s Alive premiered at Chicago’s Woods Theatre on April 26, 1974. To promote it, Cohen hired women to push strollers around the venue inside which snuggled tape recorders emitting growls. Audiences bit and there were strong ticket sales, but Warner Brothers executives found the film “distasteful” and hampered its most exploitable asset (a killer baby) with ambiguous advertising. Chicago Tribune Archive via nespaper.com. FEMINISTS, HORROR HOUNDS, metalheads, and cinephiles descended on Chicago’s Music Box

Bread and Circuses

Laurie Stone

Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke in True Things (2021) Photo courtesy of BBC Films. A few days before Christmas, we met a friend at a fancy grocery store in Hudson, where people sit at a long table, drinking lattes and eating focaccia. We hadn’t seen our friend in a while. She looked happy in the way of people who have recently jumped out of an airplane. I said, “I was thinking about Jesus.” She said,

(Some Notes On) Confession

Charis Caputo

Sam Levy, Double Figure, 64″ x 47″, Charcoal on Paper, 2021. I wonder if there might not be . . . another human essence than self. —Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound” ONE OF THE earliest books I can remember reading was a yellowed collection of children’s prayers, possibly something my Protestant-farmer grandparents had read to my mother in the 1950s. I don’t know the title; I only remember one line: Lord, if you find that

Abortion in Community

Annie Finch

Realizing I am a witch has been a life-long, gradual process, but if I had to choose one event to mark my entry into full witchy power, it would be the ritual I created to heal and transform after my abortion at age forty-three. At that time, my husband and I had two young children and two growing careers; we agreed bringing another life into our family would negatively impact its overall well-being. The abortion

The Collected Rejections of Katherine Dunn

Naomi Huffman

After Geek Love became a best seller and earned nominations for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize, and after she had earned the admiration of early 1990s punk icons like Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Gus Van Sant, and Tim Burton, Katherine Dunn wrote for long stretches in the solitude of a large blue house in Portland, Oregon. Before that, in the 1970s, Dunn was recently separated from her first husband and wrote

Boneyard

Rachel DeWoskin

A singular bleating made it clear that Frances had not saved the lives of her goat’s three kids. She had woken to growling, scrambling, and was that gnawing? Before her thoughts could clarify, she had run barefoot onto the porch, grabbed the axe that sat by the woodpile, and descended into dark so total she relied on her body’s knowledge of the yard’s slope. She shouted, swung, tried to make herself monstrous. But the predator

Issue 2.1