Tannins2 - Untitled

spaces of the mind: isamu noguchi's dance designs - robert tracy (2001)

Joan Baez photographed by David Redfern.

Isabelle Huppert par Dominique Issermann, 1980

she's so cozy

my other grounding technique is remembering that the earliest abolitionists & the earliest suffragists had no proof that the world would ever make possible what they fought for and indeed many of them did not live to see it come to pass. and yet they did not succumb to despair so it would be disrespectful to their memory to let it overtake me

So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

— anne carson, gloves on!

I want ai to take my job and kill me

Staff Pick of the Week

My first pick as a staff member at UWM’s Special Collections is The Women Who Hate Me by Dorothy Allison (b. 1949), published by Long Haul Press in Brooklyn, 1983. This small, intimate book of poetry also features illustrations by Laurie McLaughlin.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina to a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, Allison grew up in a very poor, working-class family in the 1950s. Her burgeoning lesbian identity and strained/abusive relationship with her stepfather left her feeling ostracized and out of place. After attending Florida Presbyterian college and the New School of Social Research for anthropology, she found solace in a community of other feminists and eventually made a career for herself developing stories and poems often based on her experiences. She would receive mainstream recognition at the publishing at her 1992 novel, Bastard Out of Carolina.

What cannot be overlooked in Allison’s writing is her honesty and ability to lay everything bare; to articulate what is seen but never said, as gut-wrenching and brutal as it may be. With themes of sexual abuse, child abuse, class struggle, women, feminism, lesbianism, and family throughout, she dedicates this collection of poetry to “the women who hate me who made me angry enough to write these poems,” and “for the women who love me who read the poems and helped me pull all the pieces together.”

- Grant, Special Collections Undergraduate Intern