It was a day unlike Sunday, but it was Thursday. Everyone’s knees gathered the fumes of dandelions and coughed-up dreams. There was an unspoken incantation in the air because no one was blinking. Eyes did not grow dry nor weak from remaining open; instead, nothing was missed. Everything was seen– from the foil-tipped wings of a dove flying nearby to the drip of supper sauce in the corner of a pigeon’s mouth. The humans saw the weather shift from cold to colder. Hands held other hands, instead of handheld contraptions. Love was contagious because it was noticed; it was felt. There were roses popping up like blades of grass. Various sized petals and colors like ocean’s blue and sunflower yellow. The humans left the flowers alone, but watched them. Watched them get bigger or smaller or wilt or go wild. One human picked one. A flower which had yet to be named. It was not scientific, nor was it invited. But it smelled of two a.m. wake-up from current lover when pressed between fingers. It smelled of wheat grass and cloud juice. It remained alive long enough to last until eyes finally grew dehydrated and forced itself into a blink. Then, the open-close rotation continued and repeated until suddenly things went missing. Flowers became blurs of color and animals roamed without any more mention. It was just a day.
Tag Archives: to go without blinking
a forward from my old hometown.
from…….(Boulder Weekly, 10/3/2013)
EROTIC WHITMAN
Brooklyn poet curates collection of inspired erotica
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly
I’ll never forget meeting the poet Aimee Herman on my first day of classes at Naropa University in the winter of 2008, in a workshop led by Maureen Owen, who famously co-directed the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in late-’70s Manhattan. Herman had wild hot-pink hair, dark glasses, a prolific obsession with putting her thoughts on paper, startling confidence and — most obviously — an endless fascination with not just human sexuality but our bodies in general.
As we were roughly the same age, we both feverishly wrote poems that seemed to always include references to sex and the city, and we both had come from harsh but incredibly inspiring places — San Francisco’s Mission District for me, Brooklyn for her — to study writing in the tranquil and relatively isolated setting of Boulder. My ego (about 10 sizes too big at the time) told me I was meeting the female version of myself. Our connection was instant and strong, but it quickly became clear — especially as I continued refusing to read my work aloud while Herman hosted the Folsom St. Coffee Co. open mic and constantly performed — that this outgoing, assiduous, talented young writer was anything but comparable.
Not many writers, for instance, regularly write poems on their own bodies, or perform with their upper torso wrapped in yellow “caution” tape.
“I feel most alive when I’m on a stage,” Herman says, “and I feel most at peace when I’m writing something down.”
Now happily returned to Brooklyn, where Herman’s “heart was born,” thankfully not much has changed. Not even the hair. And what’s most amazing to me is not just that, six years after graduating from Naropa’s writing program, Herman still writes every day (she consoled my contrasting lack of output recently by saying “as long as you’re breathing you’re writing”). It’s more that Herman — who teaches at Bronx Community College and Boricua College, hosts a monthly erotica open-mic in the West Village, habitually collaborates, and is a bona fide fixture on the New York poetry scene — never ceases to be involved.
“Part of finding community is also making community,” she says, “so that’s why I love to host spaces, safe spaces, for other people to express themselves. And, in turn, it feels good to enter other people’s spaces, where I can perform and elaborate on The Word, which has led me to doing more performance art.”
“Coming back to Brooklyn a couple years ago, I didn’t really know anybody,” the poet explains. “I had to start all over.”
Herman says the reason she immediately gravitated toward so many creative New York scribes is that “the people I get along with the most are poets and writers, because they understand, and they pay attention. They notice things. Those are the kind of creatures I want to be around.”
The self-described “performance poet,” who has released numerous solo chapbooks and the full-length to go without blinking (BlazeVox Books), is also doing a lot of work in publishing, from guest-editing issues of poetry journals such as And/Or to working on larger projects, like the just-released The Body Electric (Ars Omnia Press).
Inspired by “I Sing the Body Electric,” the timeless New York poet Walt Whitman’s distinctly American mid-1800s ode to all things physically and spiritually male and female (or genderless), Herman’s new book collects around 50 diversely visceral original works on sex and the human body, some directly inspired by Whitman. The idea for a Whitman-inspired collection of poems about the body came from fellow New York poet Mike Russo, who also chose the black-and-white nude photos included in The Body Electric, and it took Herman about a year to sift through poetry and prose submissions.
“[It was] an interesting process,” she says. “I was really pleased with what was sent to me, and I’m so proud of what’s in there because it’s all really beautiful and eclectic work. Most of the reason why it took so long [to edit] is that some people were sending in erotica, which is fine, but … it’s very easy to write bad erotica, and that’s what I was getting a lot of. I wanted to see risks taken on the page, and when I started to see [submissions] looking beyond just body and just language of the body, these submissions all stirred me in some way.
“And that’s why I write. I’ve read so many fantastic books of poetry and fiction that call my skin to feel like the writer is digging into me. That’s really exciting.”
Though Herman is physically attracted only to women, [after talking again to the wonderful writer, Adam Perry, I mentioned my need to emphasize that this is not quite accurate. I am queer, which refers to who and how I love. Though I’ve mostly dated female-identified humans, I have been with those of other genders and bodies] she says she has no problem identifying with writing that speaks of the body, and of sex, from the straight perspective, which is represented in The Body Electric somewhat less than the homosexual perspective.
“I write erotica and a lot of my erotica has been heterosexual,” she says. “I don’t necessarily feel that there’s a homosexual sex act or a heterosexual sex act. It’s extremely fluid. It really depends on the body. It’s for the humans who are engaging. I don’t feel excluded.”
One would probably assume that Herman became keenly interested in the human body at a very early age, but she never got “The Talk” and says that sex was never discussed in her house growing up (in Manalapan, N.J.). Having been raised Catholic, though Herman was raised Jewish, I can certainly understand her intimation that she most likely became so intensely curious about sex and the body because of a “true unawareness of what existed.”
The poet says she recently said to her mother, “You never told me about sex! Maybe that’s why I’m horny.”
“When I was a kid I was frightened by sex,” Herman admits. “I was curious and frightened at the same time, so as my friends got older and were into boys … I didn’t understand it. But now, as I’ve gotten older, I’m so deeply turned on by what turns other people on, and now that’s become my curiosity. My relationship with sex is extremely complicated, but I think that’s why I write about it so much. It helps me understand my relationship with it.”
Herman, who earned her M.F.A. in creative writing at Long Island University, has a singular ability to captivate a room full of people with her slow, smart and shockingly sincere deliveries of poems about life inside the body and mind of an independent, uncompromising young woman. Even lines from her blog, on which she posts daily, such as “It is difficult not to search for the flaps of skin that may be used like deadbolts to lock out the ones who crawl their way in” (Sept. 23), have a tendency to, as Herman says, “dig in” to a reader. And her time in Boulder, though it often felt foreign, helped shape that vivid, open voice.
“Boulder, to me, was the last place to live because it felt very small, and I wasn’t used to that,” Herman says. “It’s also extremely white, which I’m also not used to. I guess that’s why I love Brooklyn and New York so much, because you feel like you are living deep inside of a globe, where you’re surrounded by every part of the world. So many cultures. You walk two blocks and suddenly you’re in another world.
“Boulder, although the smallness in many ways is lovely because you run into people much quicker and feel like you know everyone, when I moved [there] I moved slower, which is necessary, and I think I found the hippie that was always longing to come out of me. And it has remained, which feels really good. And that I will forever be grateful for. I feel like I found myself because I was surrounded by so many wonderful poets, and it’s a magical place in so many ways.”
The Body Electric and to go without blinking are both available at Amazon. com, and Herman’s blog can be read at aimeeherman.wordpress.com.
birth day.
It is difficult to say when a poem is born. Thinking is a part of the writing process and I am always thinking and stewing and marinating in jumbles of words.
One year ago today I gave birth to the biggest puddle of words, pushing them out into a carefully constructed, bound and ISBN’d book.
to go without blinking was published by BlazeVOX books in March 2012. After collecting forms, stories, voices, echoes and various translations from numerous bodies, I created a narrative out of the webs of disjointed stanzas.
Over a decade ago, I started sending out my work. Mostly poems, but some stories too. In those days, you sent out pages in an envelope with a SASE (self addressed stamped envelope) inside. I began filling a lime green folder with rejection letters, which traveled in the envelopes I addressed. Most were form rejections: an insertion of my name cut and pasted to memorized NO, THANK YOUs. Sometimes, they came back a little more personalized.
These days, most submissions are through the computer. And you wait. And you wait. That green folder busted loose, ripping at the folds. But it needed to grow fat in order to reach the moment of YES’s.
As writers, we let go the moment we hand our work to someone else: reader or editor or publisher or mother. With this book, I have enjoyed hearing from readers– their interpretations and questions. What it meant to them and how other people’s poetry can impregnate a reader’s body with swarms of more poems.
As a young writer, many many years ago, I dreamt of this moment. I used to go to bookstores and visit the section of poetry where my book would be alphabetized in. Perhaps beside Marilyn Hacker or Langston Hughes.
Calling myself writer is the one label I will proudly own for the rest of my life. Self-inflicted and permanently inked on body.
Unplugged and Deactivated.
What would it look like to see something and not say something?
Sometimes in life, one must draw the line.
A little over a year ago, I joined a club that everyone was already a member of. It’s a club I don’t need to name, rather I’ll describe it in flashes:
I just made the best dinner for my boyfriend. [insert photo]
[insert photo of many other meals because it seems we are a society obsessed with what we eat and documenting]
Who wants to see ___________ with me tonight? LIKE for a response back
LIKE if you LIKE me
[insert photo of abs, cleavage, couple kissing, new baby, new outfit, new haircut, new new new new________]
And what finally ended my membership to this not-so-exclusive club:
[Here is me meditating: Insert photo] And don’t forget to LIKE LIKE LIKE because look at ME; I’m MEDITATING]
There was a lot of hesitation involved when I joined. It felt extremely uncomfortable to look for friends or “request” them; wait for them to “accept” me, maybe even reject me. Some “friends” DEfriended me, while I did the same to others. For over a year, I became programmed to react on screen. When someone upset me, I sliced poems onto the screen. When I missed someone, I voyeured and searched through photographs it felt awkward to view without permission.
Hours spent scrolling down, self-loathing and getting sick off the fumes of narcissism all around.
I am of the Encyclopedia Generation. My family would get a new volume in the mail every month or so and it was quite an occasion to sip the photographs of parts of the world I’d never heard of. Through these books, I learned about leprosy, wild bush women and various weather patterns I never experienced in suburban New Jersey. Only now, can we just type in a few key words and see massive amounts of photographs attached to these words and learn every thing there is to know about it. Things are faster; no need to look through a lengthy index or wait for next month’s volume to be shipped out.
When I saw a great movie, I called up one of my three best friends (sometimes on three-way conversations) and we’d talk about it.
If I got a great haircut (or devastatingly awful), I’d head on over to whoever’s house and reveal. We didn’t have the Internet, no social networks. Birthday invites were through the mail or handed out at school. If you wanted someone to be your friend, you asked them. (Gasp) In person.
For years, when mention of this “club” came up, people would be shocked to hear that I wasn’t a member.
But….but…how do you keep up with your friends’ lives??????? How do you know what’s going on????????????
I…ask.
Then, I gave in. Put up some photographs. Promised myself that only a slice of me would be enlisted in this club. No personal things such as: how that job interview went or who I just had tea with or who I am sleeping with or a photo of that peculiar mole on my left breast.
Though on stage I have absolutely no boundaries; on screen, I needed them.
So, I advertised shows and performances. I thanked publishers who published me. I put up a line or two of poetry I was working on. I made friends. I learned about events that I wouldn’t have known about.
I lost hours, hours, hours of life that could have been spent straddling trees, weeping at paintings in museums, or learning how amazing people are in person right in front of me without a screen between us.
My friend count is less now. The invites will probably dry up. The world of FACES on screen like self-published BOOKS of our lives will still exist; I just won’t be a part of it.
I have done this before. Gone cold turkey from drugs, sex, certain people and other behaviors. There is that natural mourning period.
But think of all those poems that got locked inside me because I was mesmerized by some photos of a friend of a friend who isn’t even a friend of that friend’s baby or dinner date or new apartment or or or.
2013, I am ready for you. The year before you offered me some beautiful, unexpected sights and offerings. I got a whole book of poems published; I moved into a new apartment; I finished my graduate degree; I met the most amazing poets, music makers, listeners and lovers.
But.
I lost myself in there. As a kid, I wasn’t a part of many clubs. I wasn’t invited to many parties. For a little over a year, it felt kind of like I was a part of something. More specifically, I felt like I was one of the popular kids never without a place to sit and eat my lunch.
Now I know what it’s like. I can go back to being the red-haired wallflower poet. Still doing the same things, creating and exploring and loving……you are just going to have to ask me now to tell you about it.
Actually, not much has changed.
Reading @ Bluestockings Bookstore
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St. NYC
Tuesday, April 10th @ 7PM –FREE
An experimental reading from to go without blinking (BlazeVOX books)
With Puma Perl and Jackie Sheeler
Tonight, queer performance poet Aimee Herman celebrates the release of her full length book of poetry, “to go without blinking.” Join Herman and dynamos Puma Pearl and Jackie Sheeler for a night of ferocious renegades and poetic erotica.
172 Allen St. NYC
to celebrate body engulfed in text and ISBN
Dear Body,
You are the longest relationship I have ever had.
I stopped calling you. You remained.
I used you (sometimes) when there was no one else. You remained.
You grew around the scars I dug into your flesh and got close to the bone a few times. You remained.
See me live life out loud on computer screen.
Everyday, I question your arrival.
How do bruises fail our body?
If I set myself on fire, will you extinguish away the sores?
I want. I want. I want to fold against you, body, and rewind the snort of veins and crinoline-dressed decisions all spread out and itchy.
I’ve asked you how to love. How to keep it. How to be better at this.
I’m trying to be like you, body. I am trying to remain.
And now, I celebrate you in binding and numbered skin. Call you book, now. Call you titled.
On Wednesday, March 28th, I speak you into a microphone. Just a little bit louder. Holding you up. Holding you in.
Body, I’ve launched you through windows, bedframes, over bridges and mountaintops. Now I launch you in book formation.
116 MacDougal St. (formerly the Gaslight Cafe) NYC
(between Bleecker Street and Minetta Lane)
Downstairs Lounge
Doors open for open mic sign-up @ 6:30pm
Show starts @ 7pm
Cover Charge: $10
NO AGE LIMIT.
Co-featuring Willie Perdomo and Eric Alter
thank you, thank you, thank you, body.
Friday, March 9th Performance @ Sidewalk Cafe, NYC
Boog City presents
d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press
Fri., March 9, 7:00 p.m. FREE
Sidewalk Café
94 Ave. A, NYC
F/V to 2nd Ave., L to 1st Ave.
Venue is at E.6th St.
Event will be hosted by
BlazeVOX editor and publisher
Geoffrey Gatza
Featuring readings from
Geoffrey Gatza
Barbara Henning
Aimee Herman
Michael Kelleher
Krystal Languell
and music from
Christy Davis
Julie Delano & Gold
Leslie Graves
There will be wine, cheese, and crackers, too.
Poetry booked by Geoffrey Gatza, music booked by Christy Davis.
Curated and with an introduction by Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum
——
**BlazeVOX [books]
http://www.blazevox.org/
*Performer Bios*
Christy Davis has been playing drums in bands since the ’80s, spanning a wide variety of projects, including Reverend Billy & His Stop Shopping Choir, Rebecca Moore, Mold, and Kansas State Flower. Christy has recently been stepping out from behind the drum set to perform her own songs while still playing with her most recent collaborative effort Gatos de Sensei.
Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and publisher of the small press BlazeVOX. The fundamental mission of BlazeVOX is to disseminate poetry, through print and digital media, both within academic spheres and to society at large. Gatza has received awards from the Fund for Poetry and a Boomerang Award. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Secrets of my Prison House, Kenmore: Poem Unlimited, and Not So Fast Robespierre (Menendez Publishing). His writings for children includes HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children, and Kindle books, A Rocket Full of Pie and The Diamond who wanted to be a Ruby. He is also the author of the yearly Thanksgiving Menu-Poem Series, a book length poetic tribute for prominent poets, now in it’s tenth year. He is a CIA trained chef, a former Marine, a lifelong Sherlockian, and an avid philatelist. He lives in Buffalo, N.Y. with his girlfriend and two beloved cats.
Julie Delano & Gold is the solo project of bassist, singer, and songwriter Julie DeLano. In this project she adds angelic and demonic harmonies and drum beats to her sparse songwriting.
Leslie Graves is the singer in They Would be Happy People, an improvisational art rock group at work on a new LP. She plays solo as well and released an album last year called Let it Take You.
Barbara Henning is the author of two novels, You, Me and the Insects and Black Lace. Her books of poetry include My Autobiography, Detective Sentences, Love Makes Thinking Dark, and Smoking in the Twilight Bar, as well as numerous chapbooks and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. A collection of prose and poetry, Cities & Memory, is forthcoming from Chax Press. She’s a native Detroiter and a long time New York City resident.
Aimee Herman, a queer performance poet, has been featured at various New York venues including the Happy Ending Lounge, Dixon Place, Wow Café Theatre, Perch Café, One & One Bar, Public Assembly, and Sidewalk Café. She has performed at reading/performance series such as: In the Flesh erotic salon, Hyper Gender, Sideshow: Queer Literary Carnival, Mike Geffner Presents: The Inspired Word, and Red Umbrella Diaries. Her poetry can be found in Clean Sheets, Cliterature Journal, InStereo Press, Sound Zine, Pregnant Moon Review, and/or journal, Polari Journal, and Sous Le Pavre. She can also be read in you say. say. and hell strung and crooked (Uphook Press), Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado LGBT Voices (Johnson Books), Best Women’s Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press), Best Lesbian Love Stories 2010 (Alyson Books), Nice Girls, Naughty Sex (Seal), Women in Lust (Cleis), and The Harder She Comes: Butch Femme Erotica (Cleis Press). She works as an erotica editor for Oysters & Chocolate. She can be found writing poems on her body in Brooklyn.
Michael Kelleher is the author of two collections of poems, both from BlazeVOX [books], Human Scale and To Be Sung. His poems and essays have appeared at the Poetry Foundation website, The Brooklyn Rail, Ecopoetics, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and others. With Ammiel Alcalay he runs OlsonNow, a project (events and a blog) dedicated to the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson. He lives in Buffalo, N.Y., where he works as artistic director of Just Buffalo Literary Center.
Krystal Languell was a semi-finalist for the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, and DIAGRAM among other journals, and was anthologized in the 2010 edition of Best of the Web. Founder of the feminist literary magazine Bone Bouquet, she serves as a collaborative board member for the Belladonna* Series as well as editor-in-chief at Noemi Press. She teaches composition at York College in Queens and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She lives in Brooklyn, where she also co-curates the HOT TEXTS Reading Series.
JUST RELEASED!!!! to go without blinking
Aimee Herman is a cyborg. Not in the sense of a mixture but: in her impetus. Her desire for a book to be a new kind of thinking and being in the world. As she writes in the startling Statement of Poetics that opens this passionate collection: “This body of text practices trilingualism and contraction. Theories include gender confiscation and syntax dissection.” I liked that. A syntax that records what happens to a body even more than the words themselves. And that’s just page one. Throw away “the color pink,” writes Herman, deeper in. And: “Gender is best received in a question mark.” In not with. I loved that. This is re-wiring where it counts: below the lexicon. Below the public-private register:” where the label was rubbed.” Until there’s nothing left but, as the writer says: “The most dangerous parts of me.” What those “dangerous parts” become, reconfigured, mutilated and grown again, is the text of this “sore” and “feminine” book. A book in which “words” and beloveds, of various kinds: “never stop coming.” What kind of cyborg is this?
—Bhanu Kapil, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University.
Gizzards: a word my grandmother used to mean bloody, messy, entangled innards. These are gizzard-poems. Even if the important parts are blurred you can hear the sound of envelopes unlatching, you can become the redhead body for a while. Herman tells us do not approach the scars…disobey her and masturbate while reading this book. Then go snap a pencil in half. Yes, it’s like that.
— Jackie Sheeler, author of Earthquake Came to Harlem
Aimee Herman celebrates and contradicts our expectations in her disturbing juxtapositions of unexpected images. This is a book poised to define the poet’s title and premise: “How can one edit the typos found in scar tissue.” Reading these poems challenges our comfort zone and confronts us with an ever-moving visceral vitality. The poet’s lyrical scrutiny considers all angles and actions as in the “shape of angled knuckles surfing into / independent variable”. She is breaking through taboos of language we never knew we had. Her tangled metaphors morph into surreal visions. Unpredictable, a sexuality of the unexpected that demands our engagement even as the language soaks us ever deeper into inexplicable non-outcomes that riddle like questions in a Zen koan. Experimental and disarmingly playful, these lines are a testimony, a political investigation into a sensuality that refuses conclusion.
— Maureen Owen, author of Erosion’s Pull
Aimee Herman writes so often in the imperative because she and her world insist on the NOW of the body, society, and language. She brings us the world both embodied and cataloged, alienated yet familiar. Her words are a recipe for seeing differently. Blink at your own delicious peril.
— Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive
Aimee Herman’s to go without blinking is a visceral, wide eyed, queer movement that creates “sturdy retinas” in those of us who participate. As we enter and perform this book by way of our bodies (our inhabitation) we are nervy-aghast, gasping, slobbering, terrified, aroused. Oh the confessions here– not only the confessions themselves, but the quality of confession amid the varying grits of the unveiled body. This is not a book of the stellar body. It is the core, guttural relation of body to page—it is body and page as planar path, “leaking teeth”—“a need to disrobe to satisfy.” Herman has shown us an unabridged vista of spaces and scenes where power, colonization, detriments and desires are exchanged. Nothing is held back here. We are cut by this book. We are conflated. We are ruined in the best possible ways. to go without blinking’s “tongue is too big for [its] body” and this is where its genius is.
—j/j hastain, author of prurient anarchic omnibus
Aimee Herman, a queer performance poet, has been featured at various New York venues such as the Happy Ending Lounge, Dixon Place, Wow Café Theatre, Perch Café, One & One Bar, Bowery Poetry Club, Public Assembly, and Sidewalk Café. She has performed at reading/performance series such as: In the Flesh erotic salon, Hyper Gender, Sideshow: Queer Literary Carnival, Mike Geffner Presents: The Inspired Word, and Red Umbrella Diaries. Her poetry can be found in Clean Sheets, Cliterature Journal, InStereo Press, Sound Zine, Pregnant Moon Review, and/or journal, Polari Journal, Mad Rush, Lavender Review, and Sous Le Pavre. She can also be read in you say. say. and hell strung and crooked (Uphook Press), Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado LGBT Voices (Johnson Books), Best Women’s Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press), Best Lesbian Love Stories 2010 (Alyson Books), Nice Girls, Naughty Sex (Seal), Women in Lust (Cleis) and The Harder She Comes: Butch Femme Erotica (Cleis Press). She currently works as an erotica editor for Oysters & Chocolate and curates/hosts monthly NYC erotica and GLBT lit readings. She can be found writing poems on her body in Brooklyn.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 156 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-080-4
$16 Buy it from Amazon
Forthcoming Full Length Book of Poetry published by BlazeVOX Books
COMING SOON……..MARCH 2012…….A FULL LENGTH BOOK OF POETRY BY AIMEE HERMAN published by BlazeVOX Books
”]
to go without blinking features poems of all forms, experimenting with voice, content and structure. It is a journey through gender, sexual imprints, narration of memories, observation, life, love, lust and language.
For more info or to schedule Aimee Herman for a performance/reading at your reading series or in your town, contact Aimee @: aimeeherman@gmail.com
Aimee Herman’s to go without blinking is a visceral, wide eyed, queer movement that creates “sturdy retinas” in those of us who participate. As we enter and perform this book by way of our bodies (our inhabitation) we are nervy-aghast, gasping, slobbering, terrified, aroused. Oh the confessions here– not only the confessions themselves, but the quality of confession amid the varying grits of the unveiled body. This is not a book of the stellar body. It is the core, guttural relation of body to page—it is body and page as planar path, “leaking teeth”—“a need to disrobe to satisfy.” Herman has shown us an unabridged vista of spaces and scenes where power, colonization, detriments and desires are exchanged. Nothing is held back here. We are cut by this book. We are conflated. We are ruined in the best possible ways. to go without blinking’s “tongue is too big for [its] body” and this is where its genius is.
–j/j hastain, author of prurient anarchic omnibus
Aimee Herman 