Volume 1 Issue 1, March/April 2022
Debbie Stoller
Volume 1: Issue 1 March/April 2022 Select articles available free below On the cover: Audre, By Elise Peterson Contents DEPARTMENTS REVIEWS
2.2 On the Cover
Charis Caputo
FRONT COVER: Cecily Brown. All Is Vanity (after Gilbert), 2006. Monotype; 47 1/4 × 36 7/8 in. Private collection, courtesy Two Palms, New York. © Cecily Brown. LATELY WHEN I look in the mirror, I see death. Or rather, I see the signs of creeping middle age—the widening part of my hair, the grays which overnight have become too many to pluck, the deepening smile lines—and I ponder my mortality. Yes, I know that thirty-two
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
1.3 On the Cover
Charis Caputo
On the cover: “Matisse’s Model (The French Collection, Part1: #5), 1991 by Faith Ringgold Matisse’s Model (The French Collection, Part 1: #5), 1991 By Faith Ringgold Acrylic on canvas, printed and tie-dyed pieced fabric, and ink Courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Frederick R. Weisman Contemporary Art Acquisitions Endowment. To take in the protean career of Faith Ringgold⎯as I did recently at the New Museum’s landmark retrospective Faith Ringgold: American People, which ripples across
Editor’s Letter
Jennifer Baumgardner
Me and Curtis Sittenfeld. Photo by Matt Carlson. I loved playing with Barbies when I was a kid. Because it was the seventies and my mom subscribed to Ms., I was as familiar with the feminist critique of beauty standards, “girls” toys, and mandatory high heels as I was with Malibu Barbie’s intriguing tan lines. But by the backlash eighties I had a tight perm and an aching sense that feminism was history, literally. Or
Poetry Comment
Katha Pollitt
How thrilling to include poems by Joy Ladin in the very first issue of LIBER. She’s a wonderful and prolific poet, with nine books and counting. Her most recent, The Book of Anna, won this year’s National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She is also the first trans woman to be tenured at an Orthodox Jewish university, Yeshiva, in New York City. Many of Ladin’s poems are long and deal in a deeply philosophical-religious way
Poetry Comment
Katha Pollitt
What a pleasure to introduce five poems by the prolific and brilliant Molly Peacock, queen of rhyme and meter, who has done so much to bring contemporary freshness and zing and a sometimes-startling intimacy to formal poetry. In this grouping, Peacock writes about the death of her husband, Joyce scholar Michael Groden, about the strains of caring for a sick and dying person, no matter how beloved, and about the beginning of a new life
Poetry Comment
Katha Pollitt
We’re often told that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Historically, newcomers have been expected to be grateful and to blend into the dominant culture, and that’s what a lot of them have done. My grandparents left what is now Belarus in 1920 and made a great life for themselves in Brooklyn. Not for them Elizabeth Bishop’s question, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” If they had stayed home,
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?