Issues Archives - Page 2 of 22

‘The Calm,’ and ‘Cremation Room: Invited to Press the Button’

Molly Peacock

The Calm About a blanket being held openA hand on the hemstitch of that flapAbout this feeling I will never feel againAbout this feeling you never felt sinceYou held the blanket, your arm, the whiffOf your armpit, the flesh of you whoNever wore clothes in bed, your nakednessFelt all the way through my travel clothesMy purse and my suitcase dropped in the hallAnd all the rushing, checkpoints, and rainFlying into the night like pinpoint lightsBlinking

My Abortion Name

Millicent Borges Accardi

Was not mine becauseeven in HS, I knew I wanted no oneto track me down in later yearsor the present for the shamefulact of even getting a pap smearat PP, a pregnancy test ora procedure. So many wordsthat start with the letter P.My abortion name had to be easyto respond to when I came outof twilight, like Emma or Mandy.Like, when someone talked to mein the locker room where Wednesdayabortion patients changedinto white paper robes

‘The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports’ By Michael Waters

Noelle McManus

It’s funny that the first question from many people, when they hear a positive stance on transness, is “But what do you think about transgender people in women’s sports?” As if these interlocutors had any stake in women’s sports to begin with. As if the most pressing issue facing trans people today is athletic events. And as if keeping trans athletes out of competition is sacred, noble, the last bastion of women’s rights. In fact,

‘1974: A Personal History’ By Francine Prose

Laurie Stone

It’s ingenious, the idea for this book. Francine Prose has written twenty-two works of fiction, and 1974 is her first memoir. She takes one year in her life and one dramatic relationship she formed in that year, and she tells you everything she wants to about being twenty-six back then. You can’t tell the difference between the voice of the girl she was and the voice of the person talking to you now. It’s a

On the Cover 2.4

Charis Caputo

Front Cover: Bayan Kiwan. Lesser Legible Love, 2023. Oil on canvas draped in tulle; 44 × 35.8 in. I grew up in many different places, so belonging was always fraught,” says Bayan Kiwan. She hands me a bottle of coconut water. A weak but hopeful December light pours through the grimy window of her Soho studio at Hunter College, where she is working on her MFA in studio art. (They will clean the windows tomorrow,

‘The Sexist Microphysics of Power: The Alcàsser Case and the Construction of Sexual Terror’ By Nerea Barjola, translated by Emily Mack

Jana Leo

María Folguera called in early 2019 to offer me space in the book she was putting together: Tranquilas: Historias para ir solas por la noche (Keep Calm: Stories to Help You Walk Alone at Night). Two years earlier, I had published the Spanish edition of Rape New York (Feminist Press, 2011) and María wanted to enlist me in this new project aiming to counteract the culture of fear in which women exist. This wasn’t necessarily

Editor’s Letter 2.4

Jennifer Baumgardner

Dear Readers, This morning, as I traipsed the mile or so from my apartment in Greenwich Village to our new office on the Lower East Side, the Missing Persons song “Words” popped into my brain. It starts with “Do you hear me? / Do you care?” and the chorus is “What are words for / when no one listens anymore.” Not to project epistemological profundity on an early-eighties pop song, but “Words” is about the

‘Sally and Tom’ By Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III

Noelle McManus

On an overcast Saturday afternoon, I attended a press showing of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Sally and Tom at the Public Theater in Lower Manhattan. What I anticipated: a historical play, dark and complex, about the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Parks’s oeuvre, after all, includes rich and complex plays inspired by the darkest portions of American history, including Topdog/Underdog and Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. What I did

Poetry Comment 2.4

Katha Pollitt

If you don’t know Alissa Quart’s poetry—and you definitely should—you may know her as the prose writer of Bootstrapped, Squeezed, and numerous other books about the economic struggles of ordinary Americans. (She’s also the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, which supports journalism about low-income people.) Her poems here are in a different vein, but have the toughness, humor, and barely suppressed rage that marks her prose. I love

‘On Strike Against God’ By Joanna Russ, edited by Alec Pollak

Kathleen Hurlock

Is heterosexuality a choice? A new edition of Joanna Russ’s 1980 novel On Strike Against God asks us to reckon with this and other questions posed by an earlier generation of feminists. Heterosexuality warps the thirty-eight-year-old protagonist Esther’s life—until she figures out how to shake it off. Esther describes her engagements with heterosexuality as a kind of pathology. Sex with her ex-husband was painful yet bland. She became “sexually dead,” suffering physical symptoms. An affair

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