Farris warns us, “These are not stories one can hand to another and afterward ask: did your soul move like the peristalsis inside your gut?” Instead of capitalizing on the satisfying and familiar conventions of narrative, she uses the unclassifiable text, the monstrous text, and unruly prose to explore the ways language, as we know it, limits what is possible in our thinking about sexuality. For Farris, genre – with its established conventions, its repertoire of restrictions – and gender are inexorably linked. Indeed, she shows us that our most familiar categories of identity are embedded within the very texture of language itself. She reveals form, genre, and even grammar as the foundation of the social order, that alterity which speaks through us, and at the same time, defines us.

Katie Farris is the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls (Tupelo Press, 2019) and the chapbooks Thirteen Intimacies (Fivehundred Places, 2017), and Mother Superior in Hell (Dancing Girl, 2019). Most recently she is winner of the 2018 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review, and the 2017 Orison Anthology Prize in Fiction. Her translations and original work have appeared in literary journals including The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at San Diego State University. Illustrator Lavinia Hanachiuc is a jar of plum jam, a born ceramic, and a snow shovel, which is Romanian. Hanachiuc is photography from the highly competitive Bucharest University of Fine Arts, especially in the neon light of post-communist production pottery. Pottery originates from superstition, and superstition from Lavinia Hanachiuc. Hanachiuc is a papier-maché mask of unusual size, is a husky’s daughter, is a shadow cast by a mélange of miniature monkeys in Ann Arbor. Monkeys, in their various modalities of art speak, from within a velvet bag, produce Lavinia Hanachiuc, ceramically.