Books
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
"Be careful of people who feel weak, I think. Because it's possible that one day they'll want to feel strong and you'll never recover from it. Maybe that's a thought to add to my file."
from Broken Glass Park, by Alina Bronsky
"One of the things that’s perennially fascinating about the world is the way people sell things to themselves. If people feel the need to sell something to themselves, that tells its own tale."
-Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
“Finally I took off my bra
So many wolves fell out"
Niina Pollari, Dead Horse
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
