"If you, too, are a lapsed poet who has first ceased to believe in your own ability to spin something better out of the base and ugly materials the world presents to you, and then in the point of the act of spinning itself, Anne Boyer has got your back. Garments Against Women is a cool literary hand to the brow, a genius, un-snobby philosophical treatise on making art in and around the most artless requirements of life on earth. This book gave me a great deal of hope and also taught me how to make a chocolate cake when only one small pan is available. It is a practical recipe but also an invaluable model of what poetry can do at its best: manifest indulgence from scarcity, celebration from stultifying routine, and sustenance from unsustainable conditions."
Publisher Ahsahta Press
Publication Date 2015-03-15
Section All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Lauren A.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781934103593
Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women's and children's lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It's a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival's requisite thoughts.
