Books

Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it's neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

"The sky looked like nothing, because that's what it is. It's not even a color. I looked back down at my phone and pulled up searches and feeds, hit refresh. I can cut off anyone on these lists, simple, but they'll always be there, sending out energy that I'll always in some way be receiving. I may as well know exactly what it is."

–from Surveys by Natasha Stagg

"Poetry was an attempt to dig into the buried stuff inside a person’s psyche. It used dream logic instead of the logic of our waking lives. Poems were sputtered by demons not sprung out of morality. In other words, poems were deep shit."

– Jenny Zhang, “How It Feels”

The liberating thing about publishing an essay collection before you are a fully formed person is that there is nothing to fear. You have no readers. No experience. No memories of doing it before. No wounds. The bad thing about publishing an essay collection at twenty-five, when the frontal lobe has barely finished developing, is there is nothing to fear. No readers. No experience. No memories of doing it before. No wounds.

Chloe Caldwell, I’ll Tell You In Person

"On the other hand, if they must make a statement--an argument for more casual depictions of smart interesting women; a refusal to represent smart women in a way that marks them out as supposed “exceptions” to women universally; a call for more written records of conversations between women that capture everything that’s unique to them, and everything that’s not--those are statement I’m happy for us to make."

-Dayna Tortorici, No Regrets