Anna Funder’s Stasiland was not the book I had originally intended to buy. Yet, that nagging feeling in my gut persisted with such intensity after that I returned back to the feminist bookstore I got it from and exchanged it. I’m embarrassed to say that it was the cover that…

“Angels are unthinkable / in hot weather,” — Monica Youn, ‘A Parking Lot in West Houston’ The story goes like this: the Sackett and Wilhelms Lithography & Printing Company was struggling to keep the humidity levels in their production rooms low. Their paper was warping from all the moisture in…

“What’s a person to us / but a contortion / of pressure ridges / palpable / long after she is gone?” — Rae Armantrout, ‘Missing Persons’ “Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.” — Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers The…

Colette’s Living Environment (1972–1983) — “she thinks, the material and the dream can join,” — ‘Dreamwood,’ Adrienne Rich, Poetry Magazine, 1987 In 1972, after seeing an old parachute as someone’s apartment decor, Colette Lumiere (then known only as Colette) began stapling found fabric to the ceilings, walls, and floors of her Pearl Street loft. A…

Her earliest memory was not of human faces, the touch of a parent, or even the plush hand of a doll. No, her first memory of the material world would be that of a doorway. …

Act I — 12:08 pm Like visiting a museum gallery on a weekday morning or a cemetery in the off-season, only those most loyal, most spurred with sudden agitation cut through the garbage-pimpled alleyways, past hungry crowds collecting around cafe doors and impatient dogs waiting outside grocery stories, to surrender…

From crumpled receipts and printer copies to letters left in mailboxes, paper is a material in a perpetual state of alchemy, becoming vessels for individual and collective communication, maps of memory, transmutable records of histories. …

In her first solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery, Maia Ruth Lee disrupts the stereotypical assumption that each woman will eventually have to decide between a career or a child through an unexpected system of geopolitical talismans. The quasi-readymade design of Lee’s strewn bundles—kaleidoscopic medleys of plastic tarp, burlap, boxes…

“She said people tried to be good, but they are really sick and rotten–her most of all. And every time she tried to make the world a better place something terrible came up inside her and pulled her back down to hell and took her deeper and deeper into the…