Books

"There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition."

The Wallcreeper

"The science of existence was completely out there for me to explore. Me, a twenty-five year old female. There’s no mystery why poetry is so elaborately practiced by the young. The material of poems is energy itself, not even language. Words come later."

-Eileen Myles, Inferno (a poet’s novel)

But there’s this frustration I feel when I’m sitting with a brilliant and talented friend and I realize that for the past 20 or 30 minutes, we’ve just been talking about rape: our rapes, rape in general, rapists, rape culture, date rape, rape statistics, TV rape, rape apologists, rape flashbacks, celebrity rapists, our rapists.

In these moments, my anger vibrates inside me until it shakes loose and gains buoyancy. It floats up into the air, where it hovers directly above me and my friend and our conversation. There, it does a study for another painting called Brilliant Women Talking About Rape Again.

— Amy Berkowitz, Tender Points

"I was paralyzed, of course, finding out that our lives are so exactly, insanely alike. It's not fair, that she gets to say all these things, when I was the one with the stage, and I probably lived all this first, and I was getting cheated on, and I took him back, and I was doing the worse thing, the surveys, not the phone contracts, and I was older, and more humiliated, and I was paid multiple times for my body, but never because I was a model, just a whore, and then an artist."

— from Surveys by Natasha Stagg

"Maybe it will be good to remember the feeling of being alone. I’m always running around telling everyone how important it is for people to be alone for a while, which is weird because the only thing I learned while living alone was that I hate myself."

-Adrienne Eisen, Making Scenes