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