Drupal Demo Page

By Madeleine Barnes (Ph.D. candidate in English, Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Baruch College)

Madeleine Barnes is a writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn. Her debut full-length poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was published by Trio House Press in 2020. She is also the author of Women’s Work (Tolsun Books, 2021), Light Experiments (Porkbelly Press, 2019), and The Mark My Body Draws in Light (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her work has been featured in places like The Poetry Society of America: In Their Own Words, Pleiades, PANK, Split Lip Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prelude, The Brooklyn Review, and Plume Poetry: 10. Her poetry was featured in Frontier Poetry’s “Exceptional Poetry From Around The Web” series alongside poetry by Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of fellowships from The Morgan Library & Museum, the PublicsLab at the Graduate Center, and the Center for Book Arts. She serves as editor-at-large at Cordella Press.

Language is a dangerous burning woods. ‘What's at stake is thus far what survives the inferno’. And in those hot thickets, The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen is itself a complex animal — crouching, questioning, restless, at times stalking the edges of consciousness, at times wild of mouth, with an electric charged bite. It offers a series of poetic prose texts, hybrid in their inventive logics of narrative and syntax, each piece carrying distinct music and texture. ‘I am walled and rung alive by your love, your love annihilated me from the territory of circumferences, of your retina.’ This book powerfully wrangles alienation and identity as well as grief, hard feelings, and ‘the mourning dusk of us’. The angles are vividly torqued and they touch the delicate nerves. ‘Say I a wound instead.’

Jared Daniel Fagen is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center. 

By Eric Dean Wilson (Ph.D. candidate in English)

This “ambitious [and] delightful” (The New York Times) work of literary nonfiction interweaves the science and history of the powerful refrigerant (and dangerous greenhouse gas) Freon with a haunting meditation on how to live meaningfully and morally in a rapidly heating world.

In After Cooling, Eric Dean Wilson braids together air-conditioning history, climate science, road trips, and philosophy to tell the story of the birth, life, and afterlife of Freon, the refrigerant that ripped a hole larger than the continental United States in the ozone layer. As he traces the refrigerant’s life span from its invention in the 1920s—when it was hailed as a miracle of scientific progress—to efforts in the 1980s to ban the chemical (and the resulting political backlash), Wilson finds himself on a journey through the American heartland, trailing a man who buys up old tanks of Freon stockpiled in attics and basements to destroy what remains of the chemical before it can do further harm.

Wilson is at heart an essayist, looking far and wide to tease out what particular forces in American culture—in capitalism, in systemic racism, in our values—combined to lead us into the Freon crisis and then out. “Meticulously researched and engagingly written” (Amitav Ghosh), this “knockout debut” (New York Journal of Books) offers a rare glimpse of environmental hope, suggesting that maybe the vast and terrifying problem of global warming is not beyond our grasp to face.

By Madeleine Barnes (Ph.D. candidate in English)

Fusing original embroidery art, digital collage, and poetry that draws from the Public Domain, Women’s Work is a hybrid poetry chapbook that treads the frontier between the handmade and the digital. Each poem pulls text from sewing instructions and advertisements, layered over the scanned backs of the author’s original embroideries—messy threads that reveal traces of order. Exploring women’s labor, expression, sexuality, disobedience, and gender-based expectations of virtue, this chapbook pays tribute to women’s work and art, illuminating the dangers and adventures inherent to creating as a woman.

By Benjamin Krusling (Ph.D. candidate in English)

Glaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.

By Madeleine Barnes (Ph.D. candidate in English)

Chosen for the 2019 Trio House Open Reading Selection, You Do Not Have To Be Good utilizes powerful lyricism to illuminate the soul's perseverance to live. Barnes intimately immerses us in what it means to be chronically ill and reflects on the body's connection to the planet. While the body succumbs to illness, Barnes expresses illness that tides silence, "everything / fell apart in my mouth in piles of razors / that severed language, my only tether to Earth." You Do Not Have To Be Good guides us through the ways modern medicine attempts to heal the body, as the poet bravely confides in her reader that she searches for solace in poetry's galaxy.

By Paris Shih (Ph.D. candidate in English).

In his third book, Sex, Heels, and Virginia Woolf, Paris Shih revisits seminal debates among feminists and explores the intersection between feminist and queer historiographies. Tracing feminist polemics surrounding major literary figures such as Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, as well as controversial topics including sex, fashion, and the romance novel, Shih discovers the uneven yet intertwined developments of feminist and queer theorization since the 60s. Through such a critical review, Shih not only develops an alternative feminist historiography but also foregrounds its queer potential. As he argues, the ideological contradictions in feminist thinking led to the birth of queer theory. The “troubles” of feminist history, thus, illuminated rather than obscured queer futures.

By Paris Shih (Ph.D. candidate in English).

In his follow-up book, The Girl Revolution, Paris Shih uses the concepts of girl culture and generational differences to chart a “prehistory of postfeminism.” As he observes, the history of the cultural phenomenon could be traced to the 20s, when the flapper redefined the idea of girlhood and launched the “girl revolution.” Following the flapper, Helen Gurley Brown created another wave of cultural movement with her runaway bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, reinventing feminine ideals through alternative lifestyles other than marriage and the family. In the 90s, Riot Grrrls, Spice Girls, and daughters of second-wave feminists started the revolution’s third wave through a process of generational disidentification. Rather than undermining feminist politics, Shih contends, the “girl revolution” formed a dialectical relationship with the three waves of feminist movement, at once remapping the history of feminism and anticipating the future of postfeminism.

By Paris Shih (Ph.D. candidate in English).

In his debut study, The Power of the Badgirl, Paris Shih traces a history of postfeminist cinema from Sex and the City to Legally Blonde, from Mean Girls to Sorority Row. Spanning three decades and traversing different genres, the book simultaneously builds on and revises previous scholarship on postfeminism. While feminist scholars such as Angela McRobbie critique the limits of the cultural phenomenon, Shih argues for its queer possibility, observing the intertwined developments of postfeminist and queer subjectivities at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the first book ever published on postfeminism in the Sinophone world, The Power of the Badgirl remaps feminist cinematic history and lays the foundation for what would become his trilogy of alternative feminist historiography.