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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.

Why do feminism's biggest critics always come from within? From sexual polemics, literary polemics to cultural polemics, re-summon forgotten historical controversies, and re-excavate buried historical conflicts. Sex, High Heels, and Woolf looks at how literary classics, social movements, and popular culture redefined the alternative history of feminism in the twentieth century.

Spanning the 1960s to the 1990s, revisiting the development of feminist theory, and stringing together a history with polemics, this book examines why feminists fight and what they fought about

From Jane Austen to Woolf, how did Woolf, who was regarded as a pioneer of feminism, spark a century of debate in the literary world because of A Room of One’s Own? How did Jane Austen start a feminist battle of ideas? How did "Queer Jane Austen" become an escape route for classic literature?

From Kinsey Scale to lesbian S&M, the rise of erotic research triggered feminist sexuality debate. How was Kinsey Research Team's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953, appropriated by feminists as a weapon to deconstruct patriarchy? Why did a Conference on Sexuality held at Barnard College in New York in 1982 trigger the most fierce "sex debate" in the history of feminism?

From fashion to romance, popular culture opens up a new battlefield for feminism. Why was fashion once an F-Word that feminists can't mention? How did romance go from brainwashing the "reading/poisoning" of the female public to a manifest study of feminist cultural studies? How did the so-called "male gaze" open up a series of debates in feminist film criticism after the seventies?

Shih is a candidate for a Ph.D. in English at the Graduate Center.

By Shi Shunxiang (Ph.D. candidate in English)

Why do feminism's biggest critics always come from within? From sexual polemics, literary polemics to cultural polemics, re-summon forgotten historical controversies, and re-excavate buried historical conflicts. Sex, High Heels, and Woolf looks at how literary classics, social movements, and popular culture redefined the alternative history of feminism in the twentieth century.

Spanning the 1960s to the 1990s, revisiting the development of feminist theory, and stringing together a history with polemics, this book examines why feminists fight and what they fought about.

By Shi Shunxiang (Ph.D. candidate in English)

They are the forgotten persons of history who are not part of feminist discourse, using the body, lust, and femininity to embark on a revolutionary road different from orthodox feminism.

They are the best interpreters of art, culture and fashion, with liberation, escape, and conflict, staying close to the pulse of society and speaking for themselves in the century-old history of fashion.

When feminism surged and resisted traditional patriarchy, girls had already turned around and entered the public life where society and culture blend. This is a century-old history of girls starting a gender revolution, and it is also the first time in history that girls have become the real protagonists in promoting the gender revolution.

From modern women to the sexual revolution, from the sexual revolution to girl power, let's see how the evolution of girls over the past century has been closely combined with the three waves of feminism, setting off a fashion and cultural revolution in the 20th century.