Feminaissance reviewed by Megan Milks

Feminaissance
Edited by Christine Wertheim

Poetry | Prose | Essays | $20
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-17-2
Size: 6“x9”, 132 pages, pbk.
Les Figues Press
Contributors: Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng, Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, and Lidia Yuknavitch.

Reviewed by Megan Milks

“Another anthology of experimental women’s writing!” Feminaissance opens with both jubilant announcement and weary defense. While editor Christine Wertheim’s choice of exclamation point over question mark or interrobang might slightly privilege the jubilance over the fatigue, her dedication is equal parts celebration and justification of the collection of texts it precedes. Wertheim insists, in dedicating the anthology to “all of the-M-others everywhere,” that despite historical strides in our understanding of gender (and other identity categories) and power, the Others “still don’t have their share of discursive space” (vii). It is on these grounds, Wertheim suggests, that an all-women’s anthology, a collection of what Dodie Bellamy calls “tiny revolts,” is justified.

On Kristen Nelson’s and Noah Saterstrom’s "Ghosty" (Drunken Boat, 2010)

The Fictions of Memory ( / Loss), "Getting It Right," and I-Forget-What-Else¹

By Christian Peet

We pack the physical outline of the creature with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him that we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

--Proust, Swann's Way. Translator unknown; quoted in Donald S. Spence's Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (W.W. Norton, 1982).

A few weeks ago, the online magazine Drunken Boat published a collaboration between Kristen Nelson and Noah Saterstrom², entitled "Ghosty." Noah's drawings accompany Kristen's spare but moving account of the death of the narrator's father, with whom she had a conflicted, troubled relationship. While the story suggests that her father's remains will likely end up as ashes, what "remains" for the narrator is a host of unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions, and an inability to articulate even the simplest of responses to a question about what sort of life he had lived--though, she says, "an unspoken answer fills up my mouth. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger."