Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Poetry • Fall 2019
The patrolman approaches slow, scared I will jump.
He is so young.
His hands tremble like the word please.
But I have no intention today of leaving my body.
I’ve paused only to watch the surfers collide with the Pacific.
Such strange symmetry: what the wave gives, what it takes.
Where one bails beneath the break, another glides to shore.
See, I want to say.
We live.
Poetry • Winter 2011 - Blueprint
For S.P.—
Open ocean
falls closing into
the white past dark blue
where bound, in sand,
in sun, blood, we lie
unopened: five years
of love – still
it runs caught: every cell
is a blue diver falling
the volume under papyrus stretched,
its inner face bathed as in tea –
to look old? You look
lived in, like home
till
the diver surfaces, volume
unbinds – till the page
cracks, read –
the ocean has never
opened –
the tea leaves its leaves
(the waves turn over)
the sea leaves and leaves
(almost in sleep)
we leave love
Features • Commencement 2010
By the time Romain Gary shot himself in the head, the French-Russian writer had published over fifty novels under four different names, directed two movies, fought in the air force, and represented France as a consul. His marriages—first to the British writer Lesley Branch, then to the American actress Jean Seberg—had brought him celebrity. He had enmeshed some of France’s literary giants in an elaborate hoax that broke fundamental precepts of the country’s cultural institutions.
But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. It’s perhaps no surprise that biographies of the author often seem overwhelmed by the slippery nature of their subject. “Romain Gary: The Chameleon,” “Romain Gary: The Man who Sold his Shadow.” Gary was one of France’s most successful writers, but he lived the life of a spy.
Roman Kacew was born in 1914, perhaps in Moscow but just as likely in Kursk, a small city near modern-day Turkey. His mother was poor and Jewish, an outcast in the Russian Empire. He never knew his father; the name Kacew came from a second marriage. From a young age, the boy began inventing stories about his heritage. He decided before the age of ten that he came from greatness: his father was really the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom he shared a fierce stare.
Kurksk didn’t last long. Next came Vilnius, then Warsaw, then Nice in southern France. Moving was tough for Kacew, who was scrawny and had to learn new languages fast. It was worse for his mother, a former actress who worked as a maid to support her son. She was driven to prove her son’s greatness. In each new town, she pushed the young boy to find his passion—dance, music, theater—always leaving open the possibility that he might write.
Looking back on his childhood in his semi-autobiographical novel Promise at Dawn, the writer would later paint this search for a passion as a search for a public identity. The question of a pseudonym runs through the novel. Even as his mother exhorts her son to impress his French peers, she asks that he tailor his work to their expectations. “‘We have to find you a pseudonym,’ [my mother] said sternly. ‘A great French writer cannot have a Russian name. If you were a virtuoso violinist, it would be great, but, for a titan of French literature, it just won’t do.’”
The name Romain Gary came to him while he was defending the country in the air force. Romain was just the French version of what he already had; Gary was a new flavor. In Russian, it means “burn,” and it’s a command in the imperative. He knew it best from gypsy love songs. “Gari, gari… burn, burn my love.” His colleagues began to call him Romain, then just Gary, which they often took for his first name. Gary Cooper was a popular figure in wartime France.
After the war, Gary became French secretary to the United Nations, then General Consul in Los Angeles. He was well-polished and a good public speaker. Pictures from the period show him hand-feeding elephants or looking thoughtfully through a mansion window. One has him signing books, dressed in a navy military uniform.
It was in Los Angeles that he met Seberg. She had just finished filming Breathless under the direction of Jean Godard. He had just turned forty-five and was getting bored with his marriage to Lesley Branch. At his wife’s suggestion, he began to date the actress as a means of distraction. But Seberg soon became pregnant, and Gary left one woman for the other. They were a public item—the pair dined with the Kennedys and with General Charles de Gaulle. She entertained as the beautiful actress, while he, acting the part of the expatriate intellectual, always showcased his refinement.
A reporter eating dinner with the couple described Gary as the Pygmalion to Miss Seberg’s Galatea. “‘You should see what I gave her to read,’ Gary began. “‘Pushkin, Dostoevski, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert...’” “‘Madame Bovary!’” Jean sang out. “‘That could have been me if I had stayed in Marshalltown one day longer.’” Gary may have seemed a little eccentric. But still he was a talented diplomat: he could make any young American see her life reflected in the French canon.
Gary was slowly infiltrating this canon. His novels, published under the official name, met with instant success. A European Education was acclaimed by its 1945 audience; Jean-Paul Sartre speculated that it might be the first great novel about the Second World War. By 1956, Gary had achieved France’s highest literary honor. His novel, The Roots of Heaven, won the Prix Goncourt, an award given annually to the best novel written in French.
As Gary rose in fame, his marriage began to wear. A rumor surfaced that Seberg had slept with a member of the Black Panther group and was now carrying his child. The actress became depressed; she was found on a tropical beach half-dead after an attempted suicide. By the time Seberg gave birth to Gary’s child, the two had already agreed to separate. A few months earlier, Gary had discovered Seberg was having an affair with Clint Eastwood and asked for a divorce. It’s said that he first challenged the actor to a duel.
Emile Ajar was a ruse. Romain Gary had been “classified, catalogued, taken for granted” by the critics, which, to the author, precluded them from taking his work seriously. Emile Ajar, however, was relevant and fresh. He was a Franco-Algerian medical student living in Brazil in order to avoid charges of terrorism. And Ajar’s first novel seemed to offer the novelty it promised. Loosely translated as Cuddles in English, Gros-Calin tells the story of a statistician who falls in love with his pet python. It is a touching, humorous book, and only a few critics discerned that certain lines echoed Gary novels.
Ajar’s next was even better, said the critics. Madame Rosa (Life Before Us) seemed to seamlessly bring together all of France’s post-war worries. The earnest account of an Arab boy living with his Jewish foster mother, an obese Holocaust survivor, touched on guilt, immigration, and French identity. To the discerning reader, The Life Before Us might have seemed a rewrite of Gary’s Promise at Dawn, with the attention now shifted to another boy-mother pair. To France’s literary elite, it was worthy of its own Goncourt. Ajar’s own ambiguous identity made the prize all the more important. The name was neither definitely Jewish nor definitely Arab, which, to critics, tinged the political narrative with an uncertainty. By uncovering the author’s true identity, France might earn insight into the book’s meaning.
Emile Ajar was carefully planned. Gary would send manuscripts to his son Diego, who, like the supposed Emile Ajar, was living in Brazil. Diego would then send them to the publishers in Paris. Only Seberg, Diego, and a couple of close friends could claim to know Ajar. But the Goncourt prize made the scheme difficult to hold up. The recipient of France’s highest literary honor can’t just hide out across the Atlantic—the secret had to be divulged. Before the ceremony, a revelation was released to the press: Paul Pawlovitch, Romain Gary’s distant cousin, had written the books. As a decoy for the writer, Pawlovitch accepted the prize and moved into Gary’s apartment building, where he and Gary continued forging papers and preparing speeches for Emile Ajar.
They were successful—even when Gary revealed himself to be Ajar in his suicide note, several critics refused to believe it. After all, they had made a place for Ajar in their own pantheon. “Ajar marks the revolt against the literature of our daddies; Ajar is the anti-cliché combatant,” wrote one critic. In France, The Life Before Us is the highest selling novel of the twentieth century.
When the ten members of the Academy Goncourt come together to discuss books, they’re self-consciously making history. On the second Monday of each month, some of France’s foremost writers and critics meet in a private room on the second floor of an elegant restaurant. There, they talk about the state of French writing and survey the country’s talent. The search for the best novel of the year pauses in August, when the group splits for vacation. Academy rules are strict—one book a year, and the award can be given to any author only one time. It’s been that way since 1902, when Jules and Edmond Goncourt founded a prize to celebrate French prose.
The room has hardly changed. I ate there once, on my grandmother’s eightieth birthday. The “Salon Goncourt” is shaped like an egg and lined with pictures of momentous gatherings. When you close the large wooden doors, you can’t hear a noise above the clinking of silverware on porcelain plates.
This was the institution against which Gary was writing. It was insular and back-scratching and he hated it. “Outside Paris there is no trace of that pathetic little will to power,” he wrote. So as he conformed to French standards, he was also chipping away at them. He had integrated himself into the country’s cultural monolith only to gnaw at it.
Romain Gary spent much of his existence inventing secrets, but at the end of his life he was very clear. As he prepared to kill himself in 1980, he wrote in an essay:
“And the gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar…
I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.”
Fiction • Spring 2010
The storm started coming through just then, the line pop popping with electricity, my mind wandering and thinking about sparks coming up through the holes in the receiver.
“Mama, I got to go. The connection’s bad. You’re breaking up.”
Only this time I wasn’t lying when I said that.
The storm came and took the power with it. I had filled up the tub with water already. We didn’t have much food in the fridge to start, but I packed what I could on what was left of the ice. Nothing would last in this heat anyhow.
Shelby thinks it’s all a game and I do a good job of not convincing her otherwise. We play pretend outside all morning, because I figure it’s more natural to be sweating out of doors than to be soaking through our skivvies in the house. I let her run around the yard with no shirt, even though I know she’s getting too old for that.
From time to time, Mother says Shelby will pay me back for all I’ve done. She will be one wild heathen of a teenager too. I don’t say so, but I think no such thing. Shelby is smart in all the ways I am not. She will make better for herself. She will not be like me. And for that I am glad.
This afternoon, when the sun dipped down, she and I came out back to dig around in the wet dirt, pulling weeds out of my someday-flowerbeds. I don’t know what the protocol is on this kind of thing, or what the ideal weather is for yard work, but what I do know is the green strings come out easy this way, after a storm, just like plucking my eyebrows after a shower.
Next to me, Shelby holds up one earthworm after another for me to see, all of them washed up with the deluge, whipping themselves wiggly-confused from her fingers.
My child takes care of living creatures. Always has. When she was smaller, her daddy used to take her scouting for animals at night. We’d all hop in the truck and take the big flashlight, scanning the woods for their eyes, seeing how they reflected like mirrors when you shine on them. A green pair meant a deer; yellow dots were for coons. Once we went to the pond and saw pairs of red eyes glowing back, peeking from just above the water—gators they were—and Shelby started crying at their plain meanness.
I tease her just now and say that worm would make some good bait. “Where’s my fishing pole? Let’s go catch something.”
“No mama!” She squeals. “This isn’t a fishing kind of worm.”
“Well, what kind of worm you think it is?”
She sits and I can tell she’s thinking real hard. “It’s a breeding worm. We should keep it to make more worms and then we’ll have a worm farm all to ourselves for all the fishing we want.”
My ex-husband was good for breeding, even if he was good at leaving too. Suit yourself, I told him. Don’t come around here again. I was fine either way, to tell you the truth. I hadn’t given him too many reasons to stay. I only loved him because he gave me Shelby, which is all I really wanted to begin with.
It’s a wonder Shel is as pretty as she is. Robbie wasn’t a good-looking man, nothing handsome about him. His feet, I swear, they were tough as hide, made me cringe when he would wrap his legs around mine in the bed. But he was nice to dogs and I thought he might be nice to children and he was. He was good with Shelby, even when she was a baby. He didn’t ask me many questions, which was fine with me, because I didn’t have many answers.
I know Shelby misses him fiercely. I’m sorry I don’t feel the same.
“Shel, what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m making my worm a home.”
“In my good china?”
“It’s the only kind of bowl we never use.”
I didn’t argue because I knew it was true.
A dandelion, some dirt, a leaf—a nice home for a bottom feeder. Holding the thing in her palm, all curved and exposed, it leaves a trail of dirt along her hand. Shelby has my hands, I think. Otherwise, my babies do not look like me. The both of them, the spitting image of their fathers. See already my traits do not carry. They do not take after me.
When I got pregnant in high school, they sent me away to have the baby. Nowadays, girls just go away for hours, but then, we were the girls who went away for months, months taken to give away our babies. The home for girls where they sent me was a big old house in Charleston, and we all slept in one room, like some hospital ward in an old war movie. At night there were moans from the heat and humidity, from swollen bellies and ankles. Someone was always sniffling in the dark.
Things weighed on my mind all the time, with the baby pressing in on me, me worrying I gave her a bad start, by making her weak in nervous backseat love. The boy who did it, he was not even a boy really. After it was all said and done, I heard he got someone else—as they say—in trouble. He married her straight off six months later.
I would lie still in my bed and try to think good thoughts to send the baby. I was worried she would know she was not wanted and I wanted her to know that someone wanted her. I prayed and prayed she would get a good place to grow and set down roots, where they don’t have to clip coupons or add water to the soup or use too much lettuce in the salad.
Of course that was then, and now is now, and things have changed. The cicadas have kicked it up a notch, keeping with the temperature, their motors running like loud little engines. Shelby looks to be wilting out here in the sun, so I splash her with water from a puddle, and she dances around me. We move and dance in the mud and the hair on our heads turns to slinky ropes and we twirl and it flings and hits our faces.
My firstborn, I only saw her face once, and not even after I birthed her. Thinking back, I don’t remember much about the pain during, only the pain after. The pain of giving birth didn’t amount to what was next. Even the clean, bright hospital lets you scream and scream at the hurt—at first anyway. After, they want hushes and deep breaths, for you to swallow and fake yourself strong.
I felt her in me, the baby, *my* baby and then she was out, in a nurse’s arms. Would that they had let me hold her, but reaching out my hands, the nurse moved away, too far away and she was wrapping her up and moving toward the door. There was talking all around me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I was deaf to all but her crying and crying. Crying is good, the home told us. The cries after birth tell us they are alive, they are fighters, they are here and they are letting us know.
The door shut and I was left with nurses. I cried for her, but no one listened.
I do not know how long I slept or if it was true sleep, but it felt long and heavy. When I woke up, with a dry mouth and a wet pillow, I was alone, and I ached to numbness. On the table by my head was the room phone, and I picked it up to call Mother.
“Mama, they just took her. She’s gone already,” I sobbed.
She spoke softly, slowly. “Now, Dede, honey. Please. This is what we decided.”
“No!” I yelled. “Not this way. They didn’t let me hold her. I have to see her before they take her.”
I don’t know what Mother did to make it happen, but I can just imagine her screaming at someone, saying she was going to see her grandbaby somehow, some way. The papers are already signed, they would say. It’s standard procedure, ma’am. Less attachment lessens the grieving process, you know.
Mother would say she didn’t give a damn.
Three days later, they sent me home from the hospital. Two weeks after that, Mother and I drove to the county office off Greystone Boulevard, to a white room with black linoleum. When they brought in the baby, my *baby*, well, I cried until I couldn’t cry any more. I didn’t know if I was allowed to touch her, but I hugged and kissed her plenty. Mother took one picture, a photo she kept. I didn’t need a photo to remember her face.
Sometimes, I think I see her in Shel’s mouth, especially when she is sleeping. This evening, I let Shel curl up on our company couch, or what would be, if I had the kind of furniture fit for company. We will sleep in the living room where I have opened all the windows wide to let the night air blow down on us. I brush back Shelby’s baby curls, drying now just to get soaked in sweat.
Mother would look over at me, that day, on the car ride home, but I pretended not to notice. We didn’t speak the entire drive, and our silences since have measured longer than the stretch of springs in our phone cords.
After I went away, I never really went back home. Didn’t see the need, seeing as how I was broken, sixteen-going-on-something, worn in too old already. I found work and I found Robbie and I found this place, all out in the woods, where the only sounds are birds and bugs. Tonight, I am grateful for summer storms and the dark and disconnected phone lines.
It’s just me and Shelby and her latest pet, sitting in my china bowl, setting on the end table. I thumb around in the soil for the worm and pick her up, but she does not contract in my hand. She lies limp in my palm, and even when I poke her, it’s all mushed flesh. I realize that Shel gave her water before bed and this drowning may have been her demise, if it wasn’t for all that touch.
I stand with purpose, and getting the flashlight, I go outside. I step barefoot in the soil, soaked like a sponge, with nothing but bullfrogs and crickets to greet me. Collapsing on my knees in the beds to be made, I claw at the dirt.
If I were to stop this mission for a moment, and you were to shine a light through that stand of trees, seeing my eyes glowing back, you might think you had seen some mad haint of a woman, out here digging, nails full of grime, feeling around for just one nightcrawler.
She won’t have to know the difference.
And I won’t tell her, even if, in her bones of my bones, she already knows.
Features • Winter 2014 - Trial
Last September, the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo, New York, hosted an event to celebrate the publication of the critical edition of Chris Kraus’s *Aliens and Anorexia*. The event was called “Alien Insurrection: An Evening with Chris Kraus, Emily Gould, Ariana Reines, Kate Zambreno, and Others,” and Kraus and seven other women were to give readings of the book and discuss “new feminism,” which I had never heard of. The venue was packed, the whole bottom floor of the bookstore overflowing with women: women wearing all black, women with notebooks, women with their hair heaped on top of their heads in the turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl style popular in the lit world. It was clearly an event that both the audience and the panel of readers had dressed up for, and everyone was eyeing each other up and down, unused, I think, to seeing so many other literary women in a room, uninterrupted by the presence of men.
Yet the event that everyone had dressed up for never materialized. Chris Kraus and the other panelists did read from *Aliens and Anorexia*, but it was almost impossible to understand any of them. Each spoke with her own theatrical affect; some in a quiet, sexy husk, others with an overly-dramatic swell of gravitas. The result was that no one in the audience—which I imagine was mostly made up of fans of Kraus’ more famous book *I Love Dick*—gained any sense of what *Aliens and Anorexia* was about.
Inclined to leave, I made myself stay because I wanted to hear the panel about “new feminism.” This, unfortunately, did not occur. After over an hour of reading, ten or fifteen minutes were spent on audience questions, all of which were, like the reading, answered obscurely with varying degrees of performative flourish. Then the event ended. There was no panel, and “new feminism” was never mentioned. My suspicion is that this is because new feminism does not exist.
One of the readers at the Alien Insurrection talk, Kate Zambreno, wrote a book called Heroines that was edited by Kraus and published in 2012 by what Zambreno calls the “dumb cunt” imprint of Semiotext(e), an MIT-based publisher founded by Kraus’ husband, the French literary and cultural critic Sylvère Lotringer. Heroines is memoir-criticism, a hybrid text that blends Zambreno’s investigation into the crimes against the “mad” wives of modernism with an account of her own life. “Mad” is in quotation marks because part of Zambreno’s project is to challenge the pathologization of these women as insane. Perhaps “wives” of “modernism” should be in quotations too; after all, not all the women Zambreno writes about were wives (Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein), some were more famous than their husbands (Virginia Woolf), and several were not from the modernist period at all (Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath).
Zambreno’s initial premise is to accuse the modernist husbands— along with other male conspirators—of their wives’ spiritual, creative, and even literal murder. (Zelda Fitzgerald, as most people know, burned to death in Highland Hospital, the asylum in which Scott had originally placed her. She was confined within a locked room, most likely tied to a bed.) In fact, she claims, few or none of these women were mad in the first place, but were rather driven insane by the impossibility of life alongside men who beat, raped, and neglected them, stole and suppressed their work, forbade them from writing, committed them to asylums, and abandoned them. There are probably few within the cautious world of the academy who would have attempted such radical revisionism for this large and messy collection of cultural figures, and Zambreno’s work is persuasive and important. Yet *Heroines* works best when Zambreno’s touch is light or nonexistent, when she lets the modernist women speak for themselves. Take, for example, this announcement Vivien(ne) Eliot, wife of T.S., unsuccessfully attempted to have placed in the* Times*: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned Sept. 17th, 1932.” Zambreno is a skilled curator of this kind of astonishing, heartbreaking primary material. Perhaps her greatest asset is knowing when to let the modernist women speak for themselves, and allowing their broken, desperate words ring out.
Zambreno told an interviewer in *The Paris Review*: “I’m not sure I think much about academia.” This is evident in *Heroines*, a text entirely out of touch with contemporary academic feminism. While this out-of-touchness is certainly not a bad thing in itself (it could, under different circumstances, have been a great thing), even the most casual reader of “third wave” academic feminism will cringe at much of Zambreno’s book, and for good reason. As much as she rails against the second wavers, Zambreno still succumbs to many of their most embarrassing missteps: erasing queerness and people of color, embracing gender essentialism, and treating the issue of domestic labor with haughty disdain.
Lesbianism is mentioned twice in* Heroines*: once, when Zambreno erases it (“I mean, Gertrude Stein was basically a patriarch, right?”) and again when, discussing Djuna Barnes, she irritatingly refers to it as “girl-on-girl.” This absence is certainly a strange choice for a book that includes fairly extensive analysis of Barnes’ *Nightwood* as well as exploration of the biographies of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, June Miller, and Barnes’ lovers Thelma Wood and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, all of whom were unquestionably on the spectrum of what we now think of as queer.
Throughout* Heroines* Zambreno returns to the idea of a wife: what it means to be a wife and to act as a wife—“to wife” as a verb. In discussing her relationship with her own husband, John, Zambreno goes back and forth between enthusiastically placing herself within the lineage of the abused modernist wives, and claiming that John—who cooks and cares for her, financially supports her, and facilitates her career as a writer—is really the one doing the “wifing.” In any case, Zambreno’s point is clear: To wife is to lose. In her words, the wife is the “pawn,” powerless and used. The author Mary Gaitskill, whom Zambreno lists in her book as one of her contemporary heroines, argued in an interview with The Believer that while she and her husband take turns playing the “wife,” what they could really use is a third party to “wife” both of them so they could get on with the important aspects of their lives. As our post-second wave, post-Equal Pay Act society shows us, the idea of wife-as-loser inevitably leads to the desire for a “third party wife.” Indeed, almost all powerful white women—women who, according to popular culture, are the ones advancing the cause of feminism, the shards of a broken glass ceiling glittering at their feet—are “wifed” by poor brown women who they employ to be the loser so they don’t have to, so they can be on equal footing with their powerful white husbands. What Zambreno and Gaitskill don’t acknowledge is that someone is always going to have to perform the domestic labor and personal sacrifices associated with the role of the wife, and that therefore characterizing the wife as loser preserves the hierarchy of some people over others, even if the actors end up being switched. If Zambreno’s argument were more expansive, if it acknowledged queerness not only within the lives of its historical subjects but also as something that exists now, she would probably have found an escape route out of this wife-as-loser trap, born out of a narrow, white, “lavender menace” era of feminism.
The front cover of* Heroines* is a collage of pictures of women featured in the book. They are all white except Nina Simone, and I was intrigued to see how Simone would be incorporated into a book about the wives of modernist writers. Well, this is how: There is a single sentence about Nina Simone in the entire book, and the sentence is *about her irrelevance*. It is during a scene in which Kate the narrator and John are on a tour of Highland Hospital, the asylum where Zelda Fitzgerald burned to death. Kate feels that the tour guide is paying insufficient attention to Zelda, and illustrates this by writing: “For a moment maybe these tourists are silent, attuned to Zelda’s story: a screwball comedy become tragedy. Or perhaps the guide is now narrating that Nina Simone took singing lessons with Dr. Carroll’s [the hospital director’s] wife as a young girl.” This is how Nina Simone ended up on the cover of *Heroines*. It’s almost comical, like a private school brochure trying to disguise a racially homogenous student population with a picture of a black girl. This lie—this appropriation of one of the most important black artists of the 20th century—is a crime in itself. Yet it also reveals a key flaw in Zambreno’s work: its limited perspective, its fixation with the visible. To say that there were no modernist writers of color is exactly the kind of lie, the kind of erasure, that *Heroines* is supposed to be reversing; yet with her whitewashed cast of characters, Zambreno becomes a perpetrator.
One of the most pervasive ideas about feminism is that it is in constant need of reinvention—a damsel forever in need of saving. From this perspective, “new feminism” is an appealing title, though a completely non-specific one; those outside of academic and activist feminist movements are keen to see every phase of feminism as a revolutionary, back-to-the-drawing board moment, as opposed to something that has grown organically out of centuries of heterogeneous thinking and fighting. The blurb on the back cover of *Heroines* claims that Kate Zambreno “reinvents feminism for her generation.” Is this the “new feminism” that was promised at McNally Jackson? If so, this would suggest a movement encompassing Zambreno and Kraus and the other speakers, along with people like Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles, and Sheila Heti, and even the horrendous performances of Marie Calloway, whom Zambreno defended in an essay on Thought Catalog called “All the Sad Young Pretty Girls.” Note the word “pretty.” In one of the few negative reviews of *Heroines*, Emily Keeler wrote in the *Los Angeles Review of Book*s, “A feminist friend emails me about *Heroines*… ‘I inherently distrust the kind of woman who is obsessed with glamour, to me a bit of an empty suit.’” It’s true: Zambreno is obsessed with glamour to the point of shallowness, often to the point of absurdity. She fixates on the outfits of the modernist women, describing how she buys flapper-style dresses so she can look like them. In perhaps the most ridiculous moment in an often ridiculous book, she writes about buying a nail polish from the “Swiss collection” of the expensive brand O.P.I. as an “homage” to the period of Zelda Fitzgerald’s life she spent locked up in a Swiss asylum. I would assume this was a joke, were this not a book filled with details about Zambreno’s outfits and many trips to Sephora, and which argues that to dismiss these details as insulting to Fitzgerald, frivolous, or vain, would automatically be an anti-feminist move.
Zambreno, having saved the modernist women from the pathologizing, belittling narrative bestowed on them by academic literary criticism, having emphasized that their writing is important and worthy of study, bizarrely appropriates them in order to make an argument for—to adopt a series of the adjectives she uses—“damaged girl internet diary writing.” This genre unfortunately extends beyond Zambreno and the blog that provided the basis for *Heroines*, Frances Farmer Is My Sister. It encompasses Calloway and others—in fact, according to Zambreno, encompasses all of the girls and women blogging on Tumblr (“So many of these Tumblr spaces are gorgeously written.” Are they?). It takes us beyond the premise that there is value in women’s writing to the weirdly essentialist idea that there is inherent value in all writing by women. “A disgust for Anaïs Nin is perhaps a disgust for the girls with their online diaries.” Perhaps. But even if this is true, the reverse is not; just because one woman’s diaries are worth reading, doesn’t mean all women’s diaries are.
The kind of internet writing Zambreno is fighting for is more regurgitative than deliberate (she actually uses the word “bulimic,” in the true Tumblr tradition of glamorizing eating disorders and thinness). In the online diaries of Zambreno’s “fucked up girls,” suffering—particularly gendered suffering, eating disorders, self-harm, and degrading sexual encounters—is aestheticized. This raises suspicions about much of the critical content of Heroines, fixated as it is on the mental illness, abuse, and suicide of the modernist women it seeks to save. Woody Allen in *Annie Hall*: “Sylvia Plath—interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.” Why else is Sylvia Plath even in Heroines? She’s not a modernist and wasn’t married to one, but she is very popular on Tumblr.
Zambreno’s “new” feminism is decidedly anti-aspirational. (Stylish) suffering is presented as an integral part of femininity or “girliness” (the words Zambreno uses are “fucked-up,” “toxic,” “damaged,” “messy,” “goopy” (?), “gooshy” (??), and, hundreds of times, “girl”/“girly,” as if it were an intentional fuck-you to feminism that tells people not to use “girls,” but “women”). Zambreno’s feminism is for women whose mothers were feminists in the ’70s and ’80s and who therefore resent the shoulder-padded, you-can-have-it-all, you’re-a-woman-not-a-girl kind of feminism. It is unsurprising that Kraus, Zambreno, et al. are popular with college-educated, white, heterosexual literary women, women who are smart and accomplished and who were told they were inheriting the earth, yet who find themselves still surrounded by Great White Literary Men who would rather fuck them than read their work. New feminism is for women who sleep with men in an era of unpaid internships and ubiquitous internet porn. There’s a moment in Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s zeitgeisty* Frances Ha* when Frances’s best friend Sophie, who has a successful career in the lit world, describes the guy she’s seeing: “It’s like with me and Patch…the way he always likes to come on my face.” She adds, “He’s a nice guy,” and later in the movie they get engaged. New feminism is for the women engaged to Patch.
The problem is that, like the talk at McNally Jackson, like most of the internet girl writing Zambreno defends, there is no substance to new feminism. At its worst, new feminism is a way around feminism, a way of accepting anti-feminist practices under the banner of feminism. Zambreno writes that, earlier in her life, she was “convinced that I was going to be a writer, even though I hadn’t yet written anything.” She later says of the Tumblr bloggers, “Many of these girls identify intensely as writers, as artists,” never drawing a distinction between identifying as something and producing the work (be it art or feminist theory/practice) that qualifies you to adopt such an identity. The same problem exists for new feminism, so often a title with nothing beneath it. New feminism was born into a climate of unchecked sex positivity, of a desire for feminism that was appealing to the general public, and of extreme sensitivity to what Zambreno calls “girl-on-girl crime”—misogyny committed by women, women labeling other women as “bad feminists.” New feminists thus cannot be called bad feminists even when they are; even when they erase women of color, ventriloquize dead female writers, or glamorize mental illness. It is within this lack of borders, of boundaries, that new feminism supposedly resides. But there do need to be boundaries of quality. There need to be standards for what counts as valuable writing, just as there need to be standards for what counts as valuable feminism.
Without these boundaries, everything bleeds out and in, and in place of so-called new feminism we are left with nothing.
Poetry • Spring 2010
born: drops, of water, of
sliding, of walled air
deciding *through,*
* *
*through*: the bough
bows its gem-pimpled palm:
yielding, desertion, one
gesture, a fresco, the
three lives (chaos
clear flight and chaos) speak
*nothing*; *rustle*;
*nothing*: the hand
behind’s a master’s: look,
varnish in-
-visible, doorholding
air
2026