Leigh Lucas
“Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light.”
A must-read for anyone considering making comics. So thoughtful, well-researched and interesting!
“It makes white women uncomfortable to think that they are no different from their hired help. What they chase—and have been given—is validation, acceptance, and success, but only on terms set by white men. Proximity to power, however real that feels, is a simpler choice than solidarity....Can they [white women] get past themselves and get on our level? Only then do we have a chance. In Johnnie Tillmon's words, “No woman can be liberated, until all women get off their knees.”
“He said, / Let there be light— / And I thought I was the light. // I was man's failed imagination. // Now I know what appears / as the motion of Heaven / is just the motion of Earth. // Not stars. / Not whatever I want.”
“On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away. Every single thing I have created worth a damn has been a practice of love, healing, and redemption. I know this process to be divine.”
“...I'm still trying to find words that can strike forward to the possibility—but I try not to grab them because you taught me that words are not meant to be owned. I marvel from the side at their madness. The striking is not academic. It wears a leather jacket on some days. It changes the weather. On rainy days, it is beautiful and has two-inch talons.”
“It's almost as if having a child allows a woman to see how much infinite potential there is, allows her to see infinity itself. (Am I making any sense?)
It's almost as if having a child does not sate a deep yearning but instead compounds it.
Look, the mother says, look at what I am capable of. I make life. I am life.
But how can I become a god?”
“I want us to use loneliness—yours, and mine—to find our way back to each other. I want us to play songs for each other on the radio. And when we call out across an airwave or telephone or a chat room or an app or a city street or an open field or our bedroom, I want us each to hear , miraculously, a voice calling back.”
Just one of many scenes in this book that will stick with me for a long time:
I cried, sitting in the daylight on Elise's couch. She put her hand on mine. “I just noticed that book, the one I was reading.” “ I know,” Elise said. “I remember.” “But I'm crying about this,” I said, squeezing her hand, “not that.” It felt important then to explain these tears—crying about this, and not that, mourning our lost relationship, not my mother's death. “It's okay if it's about that,” Elise said. I don't know why I thought I could partition sadness, draw boundaries around tears, name their sources like countries on a map.
“Mothering, for me, means willpower, fortitude, grit. It is the transcendent power to multiply oneself, succeeded by the supreme humility to serve the second self.”
Beautifully written and keenly perceptive. As someone who went to girls school, I could identify so many my own experiences in the pages of this book. It's ambitious in its consideration of a large array of different girls and takes on anxiety, ambition, sexuality, sexual assault and so much more.
This book is so fucking good. I am so completely happy to have gotten to read it.
“Akila takes off her headset and runs dizzily over. She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the car turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I'm honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.”
“We don't receive the things we want because we deserve them. Most of the time we get them because we are blind and lucky. It's in the act of having, the daily tending, that we have an opportunity to become deserving. It's not a place to be reached. It is a constant betwixt and between. It's in that hollow, liminal space that I think—hope?—humility can be achieved.”
“O whatever God or whatever ancestor that wins the next life
i pray let me be an artifact of use. let all my poems be
bowls or thrones or hairpieces or marriages.
let everything i make, if it should survive, tell the next world
mine were a people of faculty and faith.”
Gorgeous, exacting look at humanity, masculinity, violence, and hope. Don't miss this book.
Gorgeous book. Understated or plainly stated images are a beauty I will keep. This account of working on a trash crew takes you squelching through a dystopian future where carcasses and pepsi cans and human bodies lay waste. Absolutely would tell you to read it.
“Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.”
“...a heart surgeon told me once,
no need to worry: once the cutting starts, ‘a wound
shines by its own light.'“
“And I thought, Fuck! Those humans!Always finding a way to break each other's hearts!”
“It's hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.”
“It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroine addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
Bulrush
Every damned day I think of my child,
little floating, accidental, couple
cells, couple pretty pretty curls, I put her in
the many-babies river, I kissed her
off, good go, good go go away
from me and not be mine my
little reaching
little fingery
thing.
“She may have glanced in my direction when she said this, but I cannot tell for certain. “My” direction is in the same direction as the window (directly behind me), which is filthy and crawling with flies and looks out at the miles and miles of fields and sky and galaxies beyond that, and then to infinity. So perhaps not.”
“Beside the bridge off track, gone stray:
The English Call it War Aphrodisia, and leave it to the Brits to make strumpetting sound Shakespearean. If there is a God, and Sis I grow more skeptical by the hour, He's a mean one and is tending an Erastus-sized hole in my chest. Well, He just keeps scooping it out. I've been sniffing necks to find him again, fibbing into crewcuts, telling them they smell like piecrust when they smell like blood and mold and hunter and prey...Yesterday afternoon I saw a mound of children's bones and by nightfall I was singing, but today the thought of his strong, brown hands broke me.”
“And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It's not just one thing or another—it doesn't get fixed into a groove called ‘personality' and then run along that way until the end. But I really used to believe it did.”