Usually, after I’ve spent a good deal of time with a poem, it begins to become impenetrable to me—less a “small machine made of words” and more a symbol that enters my eye all at once like an ideogram or hieroglyph. A glance at a poem will visually summon all its experiential or psychospiritual data without requiring any actual engagement with its syntax (which also makes the poems obnoxious to revise, and often requires either another set of eyes or a great deal of time to turn the poem back into words).

Here, I’ve tried to intuitively—read: without overthinking myself into preciousness—paint visual representations of some poems from 

, reflecting not their narrative or lexical data (Klee described his work being “not to reproduce the visible but to make visible”), but rather charting the ideogrammatic content that’s hardened into place for me over time with each piece. These painted haloes feel truer to me, or at least more interesting, than anything I might try to clumsily articulate about the poems. ♦

Against Memory 

Escape to the Palace

Forfeiting My Mystique 

Cotton Candy

I Wouldn’t Even Know What to Do With a Third Chance

My Empire

Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong

How to Say the Impossible Thing 

Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic

Seven Years Sober

Pilgrim Bell (Dark on Both Sides...)

Pilgrim Bell (The Stillness...)

There Are 7000 Living Languages 

Playing off Wallace Stevens's poem "13 Ways of Looking," this column aligns with an author's book release by inviting the writer to elaborate on a selection of images that shaped their work.

The first thing I did when I began to think seriously about putting together a book was to call some artists that I had long admired but whose studios I’d never had the chance to visit. One of those artists was Stewart Uoo. Stewart is gentle and very tall, with kind eyes and elegant, long, gray hair—“handsome, if somewhat aloof,” as Andrew Durbin describes him in 

 (2017). I’d met him here and there at openings and parties, but this time I asked him to give me the full low-down on his work and he kindly agreed. We sat in his Bushwick studio as the sun went from bright yellow to brown honey on an early spring day, and he clicked through image after image of a decade’s worth of artwork, taking detours for gossip, production mishaps, and context. Afterward, we got a drink and then I went home.

I wasn’t entirely sure what he had shown me, but I felt a light buzzing in my chest. I was excited. It all felt 

the feeling of new knowledge on the horizon

the feeling of connection on a bodily, familial level.

Stewart’s work felt relevant to the book I wanted to write, to my life, to my future. But this was all just a feeling. Could I trust it? His work is hard to categorize—across sculpture, photography and drawings—but I began to graft a transformational metanarrative onto it: Stewart took his background as a gay, Korean-American child of immigrants and let it oxidize in the fashiony art world of New York. Lying on my bed, I scrolled through the files he sent me via Google Drive on my phone.

(2014). Initially, I was drawn to the image for the gay mundanity that it portrayed. Two men––lovers––laugh in a kitchen. One of them does the dishes while the other dries them. The man on the left wears white socks; the other is barefoot, and his toes almost lift off of the floormat, even the edge of the watercolor itself, as if his partner’s laughter could levitate him. There is intimacy, but there is also something unresolved: is there insecurity in the way their glances search for one another? “Something about that image contains so many conflicting and harmonious feelings to me,” Stewart said when I asked him about it again, years after our first studio meeting, “It really makes me laugh.”

 is a meticulous re-creation of a scene from a Japanese gay manga by Hiraku Taku that Stewart found on DeviantArt in 2010. He couldn’t remember exactly which one, but it was a digital image that he edited, changing the shirt, adding the crossbody bag. It reminded me of what one might do in grade school, tracing drawings and copying them out of fascination and love. Other works in the 

series are more sexually explicit, and Stewart’s hand is more visible: close-ups and watery scenes of 

(Japanese gay male romance for women), and fisting (self-explanatory). 

 captures not only the image of gay domesticity but also records Stewart’s admiration for another artist’s work. It is a reproduction that becomes its own rendition; something like a “cover” of another’s song.

The gesture of one artist grasping for another across time and space became an engine for the writing in my book 

. Taking in Stewart’s artwork was one of multiple instances that ushered this powerful feeling of artistic time-travel. At the time I could only identify it by intuition; in retrospect, I understand I had made myself open to something, and when you do that, sometimes the world whispers back to you.

Another artist on my list was Ken Okiishi—Japanese-American, long-time New Yorker, video artist. I sent him a gushing email requesting to meet up. Thankfully, he was flattered and said yes. We had coffee. He showed me his studio. The next time we met up, he took me on a memory walk to clubs he used to go to. He asked whether this or that person was still famous. I learned about 

(1997-2001), one of the earliest works he made when he was still a student at Cooper Union, Ken writes letters to famous artists like Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Jack Pierson about what techniques of theirs he could use to make his straight best friend fall in love with him. The works are simple: two pictures, usually one of Ken in the style of the artist, the other of a beautiful boy, interposed on one another, with a postcard letter below. The title 

 captures this wistful, yearning gaze, taking in another artist’s practice, as well as the gulf between them.

I posted this image to my Instagram on September 8, 2020; it shows my mom’s pink Victoria’s Secret bag next to my green Telfar bag. We were sitting in the waiting room of Blue Sky Dental in Chinatown for our annual teeth cleaning. She loves Victoria’s Secret. She waits for coupons, stalks the stores. And I was recently enamored by Telfar, a trendy unisex brand founded by the queer, Black designer Telfar Clemens and popular with Bushwick artsy types. My mom raised an eyebrow when I told her that I had spent over $100 on the bag, which is made out of vegan leather (i.e. 

). “For Everyone,” the second essay in my book, grapples with the differences in our taste. To me, I wanted the essay to enact a gesture similar to Stewart Uoo’s 

: a record of reaching across artistic generations.

“For Everyone” inspired me to look further into my own life. I wrote about the clutter and hoarding in my parents’ house that I tried to help clean up when I was living with them during the pandemic. My parents didn’t want to throw anything away, but I did. Why couldn’t they let go of all this stuff? What did I want by throwing it out? I learned that Ken had actually made an installation out of all the stuff in his own parents’ basement in 2018, and it made me think of this junk differently, as “fat to cushion the impact of immigration.” That’s the phrase I use in the first essay in the book, “A Model Childhood,” which is named after Ken’s work.

I imagined turning my parents’ possessions into an installation. And then, somehow, I did. In the spring of 2022, I asked my friend, the gallerist Helena Anrather, for a summer show, and “Victoriassecret” was born. In this exhibition, I brought together a bunch of things from my parents’ house—as well as works from Stewart, Ken, and other artists I admire—a physical embodiment of the literary approach of “A Model Childhood."

When I put words to it—this impulse to look across generational gulfs to understand art and history—I started seeing it everywhere. I probably can’t overstate the influence that 

had, and continues to have, on me. The piece documents Maggie’s mother’s life, the artist grieving her mother’s death, then eventually having to clean out everything in their New Jersey home. The best way I can describe seeing her film and installation at the Whitney is to note the 

I started looking further back into history, toward artists and collectives from a past that seemed to bubble just below the surface of where I was. I fell in love with an image of Bob Lee and Eleanor Yung, the founders of the Asian American Arts Centre in Chinatown, dancing at a post-opening after-party in 1982, because it made the past feel more joyfully present. Through my research, I became friends with Bob and Eleanor, and learning about the path they forged, as Asian American cultural workers, made my own work in museums feel like it had a lineage (“Without Roots But Flowers,” the fifth essay in the book). They danced, so I felt I could.

I probably put more of myself into my reading of these historical images than is permissible for a proper art historian, but that was okay, because the book was also the process by which I realized that I didn’t want to be an art historian—or not only that. I wanted to have idiosyncratic, irrational, and emotional reactions to art. I wanted affairs and trysts with art, not only journal articles and monographs. I often imagined what it would be like to live as these artists did. This candid photograph of the artist Tseng Kwong Chi became increasingly important to me.

Tseng Kwong Chi is known for his rigid, conceptual photographs for which he dressed up in a Mao suit to visualize the “Chinese national” he was implicitly perceived as by white Americans. But the truth was that he was decidedly of the diaspora, growing up in Hong Kong and Paris before studying art in New York. The Mao suit was a projection of what everyone saw of him––a China man––and I was upset thinking that art history had condemned him to a caricature of himself. Even if Kwong Chi had perhaps devised his legacy to be that way, I despaired. I imagined that his fate was my future. So I dug around in the archives for his image, without the Mao suit, where the artist is pictured as just Kwong Chi, and it became my sandbar in the waters of history, a place to rest knowing that his image would persist beyond stereotype.

From relevant, to revelation, to relative, my writing was guided by intuition and devotion. Before I began the book, I knew two things for sure: that it was going to be called 

, after the combination of ecstasy and melancholy Robyn captures so beautifully in her 2010 song, and that a painting by the artist Leon Xu, an artist I first learned of through Helena Anrather, who ran the gallery where Victoriassecret appeared, might appear on the cover. 

(2018) captures it all. It’s a shimmery, there-but-hard-to-describe feeling of elation, sadness, and possibility. In the last chapter in the book, “After, Life,” I talk about learning from my boyfriend Ekin that the Turkish word for the way moonlight sparkles on the surface of water is 

I did not know that word before I picked the cover, it just happened to work out that way, but it’s all there in that painting. It’s nostalgic but also hopeful, it’s happy and sad: 

. It's presumably of water but the longer you look at it the more it starts to dissolve; the sparkles start to look like galaxies. Like a city zoomed out very large, like a roll of film in the archive, a glossary of drawings in DeviantArt, or the cosmos, all in the palm of your hand. ♦

Simon Wu is a curator and writer based in New York. His debut essay collection, 

13 Ways of Looking: Simon Wu

One of the first artistic acts I remember is cutting things out. As a child, I would draw tiny people and cut them out with scissors, mostly for the purpose of tucking them inside the fold of a paper boat. Anyone familiar with my writing would probably be unsurprised by this love of collection, which showed up again in the fragmented, nonlinear essays I wrote in college and in the collages of cutouts from Google Earth I started making in grad school. I still remember the exhilaration I felt copy-pasting the first parking lot onto a blank Photoshop canvas for 

. Against the black backdrop, the excised shape was now free to enter into a conversation (about parking lots) with other parking lots.

In 2017, not long before I would start writing the talk that became my book 

, I went to an exhibit on Surrealism at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and saw a collage I would never forget. It was the five-foot-wide 

Midday Forfit: Feignting Spell II (Spring)

, made in 1972 by an artist who went by the mononym Jess. This piece felt like something I had been waiting to see, or had been trying to make, for years without success. It had to do with its sheer scale and coherence, marshaling what must have been thousands of pieces—from magazines, engravings, and puzzles—into one epic tapestry that moved me in an immediate way. I find it significant that even though I didn’t see the image again until years later (it’s almost nowhere online), the shape and effect of it remained in my mind: two figures in the color palette of a luxurious Turkish rug, swinging through a profusion of images that spill onto a wooden frame.

 and the pieces that represent the other “seasons” of this series are from the middle of Jess’s career, itself somewhat surreal. Born Burgess Collins in 1923, Jess grew up in a conservative family in Southern California, studied chemistry, and was drafted to work on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (where he also sent away for a copy of 

). In the years following the war, he took adult painting classes while working on plutonium production at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Washington state, now one of the most contaminated nuclear waste sites in the country. In 1949, Jess had a “nightmare premonition” that the world would destroy itself by 1975. He had also come to the conclusion that “the real truth—if there is such a thing—that you can learn from science is how little we know about reality,” and that “art seemed to address this more openly.” Jess redeployed himself to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute (the same place where I would later cut up parking lots), dropped his last name, and married the poet Robert Duncan, with whom he’d fallen in love at a poetry reading at UC Berkeley.

Jess eventually moved on from making his own paintings to collaging, assembling found objects, and reworking old paintings that he found in thrift stores. More than one person has used Jess’s training as a chemist to inform a reading of his work as alchemical. (One reviewer in 1993 referred to him as “the supreme alchemist of the junk shop.”) Likewise, even before I knew any of this background, Jess’s work moved me because it so vividly exemplified what I love about collage: it’s not something from nothing, but something from something. The ingredients don’t just hang together in a new way; they truly become something else. Rather than a style of image or gesture, there is a style of 

—you know a Jess collage (or “paste-up,” as he called them) when you see one. Duncan, who frequently collaborated with Jess, understood this alchemy better than anyone, writing: “Absolutely no part here is originally the artist’s. What he has achieved is totally his, but in every detail derivative.” This is perhaps most apparent in pieces that Jess made after he noticed that puzzle companies used the same cutout molds on different images, and subjected this knowledge to his own strange ends.

As someone equally drawn to the visual and the literary—and who experiences this as a conflict only when conventional boundaries are applied—I felt some deep sense of recognition when I found that the two books on Jess in the UC Berkeley library were in completely different sections: one in visual art, the other in poetry. In some of his earlier collages, recalling Dada, Jess used words alone; he also made his own books (a format he already saw as a “collage space”), which contain gleefully impure mixtures of images, quotes, and his own poetry. Many of his collages are covers for the books and journals of poet friends. 

’s fragments may be wordless, but they still pun and rhyme. They frustrate any extractive approach to reading, the idea that content can be detached and refined from its context. In the paste-ups, each piece, each participant, each “word,” takes its meaning from other pieces. It is all selection and placement.

Not that I think anyone who looks at Jess’s more complex paste-ups would believe they were easy to make, but as someone who works according to a similar logic, I know the unseen periphery of time required of each composition. Some of Jess’s paste-ups took years to make, and his unfinished project 

 took decades. This would have included not just cutting and pasting, but noticing, first of all. In one interview, Jess told the curator Michael Auping that he salvaged most of his imagery from books, magazines, and postcards wasting away in thrift stores, but that images could also be salvaged from “a possible obscurity” if they had “spoken up out of the matrix of images that surround them.” Auping reports that Jess treated his scraps like family heirlooms and would sometimes hold on to a clipping for more than 20 years. While 90 percent of his filed-away scraps never made it into a piece, Jess would “ritualistically continue the process of searching, finding, and filing.”

Searching, finding, and filing—especially in seclusion, as Jess often worked—are what sense-making looks like to me. I grew up in a time of grotesquely proliferating information, easier than ever to access and with a seemingly total lack of structuring narrative. For me, collection and arrangement were a response, a necessary adaptation: you could give up and live in a senseless world, or you could set about building sense from whatever scraps you could find. But this arrangement could be a pleasure in and of itself, full of devotion to each little piece and to the kind of complexity that needs only finding, not making. In a short text collaged into an announcement for Jess’s 1989 show at Dilexi Gallery, Duncan calls Jess’s art “not impression, not expression, but an involvement in 

.” It is this assumption that meaning is to be found among 

In the pandemic years, when I was writing 

, I sometimes returned to the humble art of making collages from whatever magazines were lying around, inevitably with 

in the back of my mind. I did this not as an art practice, but as a writing practice. Collage reminded me that even in nonfiction, there are so many more ways for things to be related than in a linear, causal manner. Likewise, those little collages were how I remembered that my book was not so much a traditional argument as an arrangement, what Jess might’ve called “a matrix for the imagination.” In 

, I mention the closing exhibition for my residency at Recology SF (the city dump), where I had made something like a collage: an archive of two hundred salvaged objects, monomaniacally researched and presented with tags you could scan in order to learn their life stories. “I don’t get it,” a woman had said to me. “Did you actually make something, or did you just put things on shelves?” The truth was that, with utmost care over months of late nights in the studio, I 

 just put these things on shelves. I’d compiled these histories, put them there, for her—to help her see them anew.

Maybe it’s just because I don’t like being told what things mean, but to me, the most generous thing an artist can do—regardless of medium—is to create a distinctive space, a kind of ego-less garden in which a visitor finds her own way. Auping, the curator, once asked Jess if there was some specific personal history behind 

, a drawing-turned-collage-turned-painting that he started in 1954 and was still working on in 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck and he had to reorganize all of his files. Jess responded, “There are many stories. I really would not want to tell you what I see and that often changes anyway—because that would limit your seeing.” The work was, for him, “not a narrative, but more a dialogue of presences.” Likewise, for the curator Ingrid Schaffner, the paste-ups offer “no traditional ground to stand on or conventional narrative paths to follow,” calling upon the viewer to perform “an open mode of exploration across a deliberately slippery terrain.” Slippery, but not traction-less. The explorer is not lost. Schaffner is describing the kind of richness and density that offers trust—and, in my opinion, respect.

This means that each viewer’s experience, provided they accept the invitation, is bound to be especially personal. In a review of that 1989 Dilexi show, toward the end of a generous contextualization of Jess’s work and a defense of collage against claims of postmodern cynicism, Rebecca Solnit (an art critic at the time) included a surprisingly touching detail when describing one of the paste-ups. She wrote, “I liked best the tiny lion bearing a cupid as he bounds over a lotus.” I too have little favorites: the woman’s arm turning into a package of saltines in 

; the bathing man sipping tea spliced into the creek in 

Or Fête Champêtre Up Mnemosyne Creek [Autumn]

; Barbara Streisand’s eye (the only visible remaining remnant of the poster he used) peeking through puzzle pieces in 

; the inviting wooden chair amidst red and white dahlias in 

, suggesting a place to sit and admire the tangled garden of imagery.

The day I spent hunched over the two Jess books in the Berkeley library (before they would be re-shelved to their separate homes in art and poetry), I emerged from the building only to find myself in a different collage. The paved walkway was straight, but the campus was made out of fractal paths of noticing, each with its own surprising details: the perfectly constructed beehive outside the library, the man in a skeleton costume posing for a photo in front of the science building, the peregrine falcon shrieking overhead while he did. Every oak leaf, edges backlit by the afternoon sun; every tired shoe crossing Oxford Street; every menu item outside the Persian restaurant; every metal pipe along the ceiling of the BART station; every plastic curve of the AC Transit bus; every scratch on the window through which I saw every stucco wall and peeling billboard. In the visual frame left to me by Jess, the meaning was to be found not in the things themselves, but in the dialogue of their presences. It’s a language I’m still learning how to see and write in. ♦

Jenny Odell is an American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, California. Her most recent book, 

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

13 Ways of Looking: Jenny Odell

One of my first mystical encounters with art was returning to visit the Joseph Cornell rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, when I came of age in that city. Often I would take the train just to see Cornell’s boxes, which at the time were in a darkened series of rooms, a nesting atmosphere like the artist’s cellar. In the backroom, you could push a button for the blue light to go on, in one of the 

. Everything felt so bright and glassy and different once they were moved to the new Modern Wing years later. Thinking of Cornell’s poetics of organization helped me think about form as I became a writer—the page as a room or a box, inhabited by objects—and allowed me to think about tone, which had something to do with light. How could a passage of text somehow glow with its inner memory? How could writing be somehow about the mystery and magic of collection?

Often, the letters and diaries of Joseph Cornell have illuminated my work—they appear in my book 

, which is about thinking through writing as correspondence, and the (small) life of the interior. And I return to Cornell as a patron saint of 

, a project that attempts to document the beauty and exhaustion of two years spent mostly indoors with small children, with excursions to parks and other public spaces. The book takes the form of a series of meditations whose energy and shape are informed by Cornell’s own ways of looking, his own life of thinking and artmaking. Even the idea of a series, or working within variations, is inspired by Cornell—one of the main movements of the book, “Medici Slot Machines,” thinks through childhood toys and collectibles; it’s named after his assemblages that herald children as nobility, as well as his soap bubble sets, that also gesture to the beauty and ephemera of childhood. But the inspiration of Cornell, and his idea of “illuminations”—observations of the outside world, often gleaned from daily walks—is everywhere throughout 

’s first movement, “Lightboxes.” It’s set in a domestic interior—sometimes cozy, other times claustrophobic—but marked by muddy and solitary walks in the park, amidst brightness and shadow. Perhaps the atmosphere I was looking for in this winter notebook was the feeling of looking through a series of lighted windows.

Whenever I write a book, I search for ways to categorize its forms—for 

I turned to forms of light, notebook pieces that felt to me like translucencies. A friend who read it suggested that the book reads like a calendar, which I really liked. Visual calendars were an inspiration for 

, as well as what I am actively looking at in its pages. The paintings of Etel Adnan, who died when I was writing the book, and whose poetics linger throughout, were key, as was her belief in finding energy in the seasons. In the book, I write about the first time I see art again in the outside world during the pandemic—it’s the 

 at Galerie Lelong, in the winter of 2020. I recall holding the hand of my oldest, while wearing my newborn, regarding both Adnan’s small vertical planet paintings—the simple beautifully colored circles that look like calendars for children—as well as the quartet of her seasons, the blots of paint around the black lines of trees.

Etel Adnan’s paintings are so wonderful to look at with children. The title of the show, “Seasons,” is a quote from Adnan’s 2017 book-length poem 

, which I love and teach—“Why do seasons regularly follow their appointed time, deny their kind of energy to us?” I think in 

, beginning with the winter notebook, I am asking whether a narrative can emerge out of the seasons.

For so long I have been trying to think about how to write the poetry of Yuji Agematsu, his gleanings from his daily walks around New York City. He collects bits of detritus off the streets—pieces of gum, feathers, wisps of hair, candy wrappers, assemblages—which he gathers together in the cellophane wrappers of daily cigarette packs—what he calls “zips”—which are then arranged in calendar-like monthly rows in Plexiglas cases, miniature ecosystems that continue to decay over time. Throughout

, I think about Agematsu’s “zips” when watching the accumulation of things in my apartment, the charge of the juxtaposition of things, both inside and outside, as Jane Bennett writes in 

, and my thinking through domestic time, comes from meditating on artists who made conceptual work out of time, out of the ritual of gathering and organizing, which reminds me of the play of children. 

I began to think of this as a box practice—mine, Cornell’s, Agematsu’s. David Wojnarowicz’s Magic Box, the collection he kept under his bed of 59 small objects, stored in a wooden citrus pine box. I first saw it in a show curated by Julie Ault at Galerie Bucholz, on the Upper East Side, in 2016. In 

 I think about how Joseph Cornell and David Wojnarowicz collected what children often collect, or how the Magic Box was possibly an actual collection kept from childhood, or recollected, like Cornell, after being an adult.

What did it mean, I wondered, that Wojnarowicz’s Magic Box contained objects like my five-year-old child’s own box practice: the toy horses, the plastic bugs, the beaded necklaces, the foreign coins, the stones, glass and crystals arrange by color, sometimes housed in tiny embroidered purses and even tinier boxes; items that took on a magical, almost totemic, function in Wojnarowicz’s videos and paintings. There is a magic, also, to the list of objects, as recorded in the finding aid at the Fales Library at NYU, to the actual fragments on the page, that I repeat in 

 is also enthralled by the weirdness of the natural history diorama, its play of reality and unreality. The second movement in the book, “The Hall of Ocean Life,” thinks through ecological grief and planetary despair, finding solace in David Wojnarowicz’s grief journal, which reveals a deep love of the natural world, the land of forest and swamps, of reptiles and dogs, clouds and trees, filtered through the black and white photographs of Wojnarowicz’s mourned love and mentor, Peter Hujar. I document trying to write about the grief journal, and also Wojnarowicz’s unfinished film of the beluga whales at the Coney Island Aquarium, which he and Hujar would visit as Hujar was dying, a spectacle they found beautiful and devastating. I write through visiting the Natural History Museum and the polar bear diorama I knew first from the photograph of Hiroshi Sugimoto, which most likely prefigures Wojnarowicz’s own famous photograph of a buffalo diorama in Washington DC. 

While walking through the Hall of Ocean Life at the Natural History Museum, I also think about Etel Adnan’s love of the horizon in her paintings, and Sugimoto’s own 

, and how Wojnarowicz wrote about clouds, the play of darkness of light, the utter abyss. 

 I’m searching for artists who document the ongoingness of domestic time. “The Hall of Ocean Life” is layered over several winters, going from early pregnancy before the pandemic to breastfeeding a growing baby. In this movement I think about that Peter Hujar photograph of the baby breastfeeding against the planet of his mother’s breast, the utter absorption of time passing. Mierle Laderman Ukeles considered breastfeeding part of maintenance art: the often invisible, often arduous domestic labor documented in her 

 as well as in artworks like her piece “Dressing to Go Out/Undressing to Go In.” I reference this work in “Lightboxes”: the artist putting on and off the outside winter coats and boots of her two children, with white dust cloth and a chain as a three-dimensional object, care work as endless repetition.

The last movement of the book, “Translucencies,” is a notebook of seasons, holidays, and exhaustions. It’s dedicated to the sisters Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer, inspired by their ways of looking, and their conceptual projects documenting time and the ephemeral. When looking at foil birthday balloons stranded in bare park trees, or watching children build melting snowmen, I think of Rosemary Mayer’s outdoor installations, which she called temporary monuments, her balloons or snowpeople, transient festivities.

Throughout the reoccurring winters, which appear at the beginning and end of the book, I thought of the texture of Howardena Pindell’s glittery paintings, made out of hole-punched paper and foam, which have the feeling and memory of New York City blizzards.

All of these artists and artworks I actually write about in the book. For me writing is about looking and thinking and feeling.

One artist who was important to the book but, I realize, is not referenced at all is the artist Ruth Asawa. I remember on a visit to MoMA spending time with the repetition of her 

 in a tight irregular grid on a sheet of fabric—neither painting nor weaving but suggesting both. Asawa made the piece in her student days when she worked managing the laundry facility of Black Mountain College. The morning I was set to be induced with my second child, in the first August of the pandemic, I remember staring at 

 making one of her wire sculptures, surrounded by her children. I found comfort in realizing how close to children and childhood were so many artists that I loved, and that the space of the domestic could feel like abundance. ♦



is out this month from Riverhead. Her next one,

, with Sofia Somatar, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in November.

Kate Zambreno

13 Ways of Looking: Kate Zambreno

I began writing some of the sentences in 

 twenty-four years ago, the night my friends and I found out that we had lost Ken. Most of us were juniors; I’d just turned twenty-one a few weeks earlier. At the time, it never would have occurred to me that I was writing a book or that I would become a writer at all. I was just taking notes in order to have something to do, to soothe myself, to catalog all of our minor adventures or inside jokes so that I would never forget. I wrote about the past, and I wrote about those first few days in meticulous detail because it was a way to avoid actually being present. Exploring memories was a way of forestalling the future, and it brought calm to retreat to the page.

I’ve always been a sentimental person who finds comfort in being surrounded by stuff—books, records, trinkets, posters, commemorative T-shirts, photographs. But my fascination with keepsakes and mementos took on a different shape after Ken’s death. I kept this old, padded mailer full of things I associated with him: receipts, bottle caps, notes scrawled on napkins, a boarding pass for our trip to San Diego for his funeral, the last pack of cigarettes we ever smoked. Over the years, this envelope took on a talismanic meaning to me. It was as though these things were clues, and if I arranged them correctly, if I held them to the light just so, I would figure something out.

What could any of these things actually reveal that I did not already know? I always found it strange that Export ‘A’ cigarettes included a calendar in their packaging. On the one hand, it felt so grown up—as though we had somewhere to be, plans to make, a reason to think beyond next weekend. On the other hand, it was morbid to be reminded of passing time while we diminished our lung capacity, numbering our days in a literal way with each theatrical drag.

I just looked it up. Apparently the calendars date back to a time when Export ‘A’, a Canadian brand, distinguished themselves from competitors by printing hockey schedules on their packs.

I wonder how many of the small mysteries we pondered in college could have been resolved quickly with access to Google. Rather than debating other people’s theories about 

, we advanced our own. Without any comprehensive list of obscure ’80s and ’90s network sitcoms, we did it ourselves. When you’re young, boredom is the crucible of friendship—you’re just looking for ways to pass the time. And there was only so much time you could pass on the circa-mid-’90s Internet. It felt manageably vast, yet it wasn’t to be taken too seriously, as I discovered when I would uncritically forward messages about easily-debunked conspiracies to my Berkeley comrades. Web pages would come and go randomly, and if you accidentally deleted your emails, they were lost forever. Instead, we would spend hours trolling conservatives in an AOL chat room. I always thought my friends—Ken, Ben, Sean, sometimes Anthony—were sacrificing something spending Friday nights that way. For an issue of my zine—a xeroxed, scissors-and-tape affair I would leave around Berkeley coffee shops—I compiled a list of my favorite websites:

Back then, we rarely took pictures. It was obtrusive—it wasn’t until my thirties that you could comfortably carry a camera around in your pocket. Developing film was labor-intensive and costly. But even at the time, there was a delight in the lag between when you took a picture and when you held it in your hands—sometimes it would be weeks or months later. I visited Ken in San Diego one winter, and while he was buying cigarettes at 7-Eleven, I leaned out the window and took this photo. I thought it would look cool in my zine—there was something about the way this generic, corporate sign looked on this night, against this sky, out the window of this car. I have no other photos from the trip because, I thought, 

who needs a photo of someone you see all the time

When it came time to lay out the book, my brilliant editor, Thomas, suggested including images like this one. Our common reference point was the late German writer W. G. Sebald, whose restless, relentless writing is often broken up by small, inset photos. I am not 

 comparing myself to Sebald. But the use of images in his books make the lives and events he describes feel real, even though, as I would find out many years later, many of these histories were invented. This didn’t make them feel any less “true.”

 doesn’t have “chapters,” and the sections aren’t numbered or named, so initially I thought of using the images as a way of breaking up the text. There are moments of doubt in my book—again, not Sebaldian! It’s more about the fallacy of memory, of withdrawing into a state of being “stuck in the past.” But I like how the images in the book—photos, scans of old posters and flyers—offer fleeting glimpses into the past without feeling like specimens. It’s like you’re walking down the corridor of a dorm, peeking into all the open doors, and you see all these different lives as you continue on your way.

The dorms. The great equalizer. Berkeley is a huge school, and that means it’s not as hard to reinvent yourself as it might be at a small college, like the one I teach at now. Four years is eight chances to show up for a new semester with an unprecedented haircut, nickname, or personality. Nobody would ever know this wasn’t who you were before winter recess.

In the beginning, in the dorms, I immediately sorted everyone according to taste—what they had on their walls. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t think to give Ken a chance when we first met—he was too “mainstream.” His room was decorated with photos of his high school glories. But I was here in search of new adventures, and the posters on my walls were a form of communication to anyone who might take me away with them. I didn’t have a ton of wall space in my first-year triple, so I hung things on the ceiling, inches above my bunk. One of the first posters I bought upon arriving at Berkeley was a Björk “subway poster.” I had never been on a subway and I did not know what a “subway poster” could possibly be. It turned out it was the size of my entire bed, her forehead was as big as my pillow. I slept underneath it for a few days before it began to terrify me.

I eventually downgraded to smaller magazine cut-outs. Throughout college, my walls were like a constantly changing bulletin board of whatever was going on that week. It was like a projection of my interests, and refreshing my walls was a way of exploring new facets of who I thought I was becoming. I would hang protest leaflets,

Xerox “art,” or mock-ups for my zine. I think this is a close-up of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy for a benefit reading for Assata Shakur.

I was always looking for material for my zine. Why did I ever write before this? It was to bring a self into focus. It was a distress signal—

? Sounding the deep. If I’m honest, it was also for the free CDs I promised record labels I’d review. But I measured my own growth by the quality of it—the “insight” (lol) of the writing but also its aesthetic. Like when I finally got a scanner and started copying the graphic design of magazines I adored, like 

The future was coming into focus for many of my friends. A vast majority of them were going into “business.” Ken had a dream of going to law school “back East”—a funny phrase for a Californian to use. In the absence of any more distinct paths to follow—I told anyone who would listen I wanted to be a “researcher” when I grew up—I even fantasized about becoming a “designer,” whatever that was. I honed my “skills” by making my zine and laying out campus magazines

(Note: I did not do the drawing on the left. Otherwise I would have added “illustrator” to my list of fantasy vocations.)

I had gone to college to look for people who were just like me. My people. There is this path on campus where Asian frat guys in matching, embroidered coaches’ jackets handed out party flyers. I remember this one time, a guy handed me a flyer and then looked at me, quickly judging my posture, gait, and thrifted clothes, and pulled it back. I thought it was hilarious—I wasn’t offended, I wouldn’t have wasted a flyer on me, either. We were members of different tribes. I drove an old Volvo decorated with bumper stickers for indie bands. He probably drove a modified Integra.

Then again, maybe we weren’t all that different. Perhaps, in another context, we could have been friends. It’s obvious to me now, but it wasn’t then, that your sense of selfhood needs to be complicated as much as it needs to be complete. That’s what a lot of these things make me think now. Every now and then, a flyer for some show or conference will fall out of some old book by Aristotle or Hannah Arendt I haven’t opened in decades, and I’ll tumble into the past, wondering where I went to eat afterward, what cigarettes I was smoking at the time, whether I went home and wrote about what I saw or heard in my journal.

 that I realized all the things I’ve held onto since that time aren’t clues. There’s no mystery. There’s no meaning rooted in the past. But turning these materials and memories into something new—something forward-looking—has changed my relationship to the ruptures of the past, as well as the things I associate with them. For years, they were in a drawer next to my desk. I’ve put all of these photos, flyers, and old zines in a box, and they’re in my closet now. Except this poster, which still hangs on my wall. It reminds me of a moment. But the fonts and colors, the aesthetic and day-glo optimism of ’90s rave graphics, the alien serenity—it reminds me to regard all possible futures, too, even ones that never came. ♦

a professor of literature at Bard College, and the author of 

13 Ways of Looking: Hua Hsu

Rachel E. Gross

 started out as a dive into the innermost reaches of the human body, one that I hoped would bathe readers in the wonders of reproductive biology. Along the way, I would recount the wacky history of how scientists of yore envisioned these elusive organs (uteruses as inside-out penises! Ovary juice as the elixir of life!), as well as all the ways modern explorers are reimagining them today (uteruses as hotbeds of regeneration! Ovaries as rechargeable batteries!). By journey’s end, I hoped to impart a sense of how much the uterus, ovaries and vagina do to support body-wide health beyond just baby-making: for instance, by participating in immune function and pumping out hormones that support virtually every bodily system, from blood to brain.

In doing research, and in thinking about the kind of illustrations that would reflect these aims, I pored through old anatomical textbooks and archives of long-dead scientists. A few themes stood out: over and over, the female body was described as an inferior, shoddily constructed version of the standard male body. Female genitals were drawn as unfinished or inverted male ones, and generally considered interesting primarily for their 

. In other words, I had no shortage of examples of the kind of imagery I hoped to move beyond. The challenge in creating imagery for the book became clear: to imagine a landscape that didn’t yet exist.

I first became aware of Armando’s work in 2019, when I wrote a piece for a special section of the 

I was thrilled to see the piece, which was called 

“Why Women on the Pill Still ‘Need’ to Have Their Periods,”

 accompanied by a finely sketched image of a a pearly egg cell, sitting atop a Pill container and being hungrily circled by two eel-like sperm. The artist was Armando. He had illustrated this entire section with images that took the masculinized visual language of scientific sketches, test tubes, and bodily organs, and undercut them with surprising, whimsical, and often delightful flourishes.

Armando’s drawings echoed how I was starting to imagine the female body: as a world etched with care and precision, yet also bursting with unexpected details, tendrils of possibility that had yet to be described.

I reached out to him and, in our first conversation, he asked me to sketch a “thought map” of my book. Kindly declining to make fun of my artistic skills, Armando was able to distill from my crude sketch some big themes: power, pleasure, resilience, and decolonization. He also got a sense of the playfulness and surprise we were both bringing to the project, and to the visual world we would co-create—a world that zoomed in on the organs of the female (and nonbinary) body as uniquely active, dynamic, and regenerative.

Armando Veve

When Rachel shared how she was going to structure her book, a landscape took shape in my mind. Each pillar of thought became an erected or excavated site to discover in her “No Man’s Land.” The language of maps, infused with wonder and discovery—and also rooted in a darker history of colonialism—gave me a fertile starting point for understanding Rachel’s project, a quest to reclaim a history that was once taken without consent.

At first, though, I admit I was hesitant to take part. I thought the images for the book should be made by a female illustrator who would be able to connect with the subject matter from a place of shared, personal experience. What right did I have, as a queer, cis-gender male, to create images meant to reclaim the history of a body that was not my own?

But it was clear from an early draft Rachel shared with me that she was not just writing a book about the female body solely for a female audience. She was writing a history of the female body as a window into a greater understanding of all bodies. From our first Zoom call, I felt a kinship with her. Working on 

 became an opportunity for me to move outside my comfort zone and engage in a conversation that transcended gender.

We began to exchange ideas and visual inspirations—both antiquated images and newer ones, like this beaver holding a vibrator from a WIRED article Rachel wrote years ago. It became apparent that our collaboration could be special.

 has a central character, it may be the clitoris. No body part has been argued over so vehemently, disparaged so thoroughly, or “discovered” so many times by a parade of male anatomists. Andreas Vesalius, the so-called “father of anatomy,” once mocked his rivals for claiming to have uncovered “this new and useless part.” And yet, time and time again, the clitoris has managed to emerge from this history of erasure, reinventing itself as control center and feminist icon.

A key inspiration for how we sought to re-imagine this organ came from Brooklyn artist Sophia Wallace. Long before 

 was a twinkle in my eye, Sophia had spent years learning the shape and contours of the full clitoris, creating 3D sculptures to represent its full form, and inspiring a new iconography of the clitoris she calls “Cliteracy.” Just as towers and obelisks subconsciously evoke the male phallus, her sleek, curving sculptures are part of a burgeoning movement to create equally recognizable shapes that reference the power and potential of the female genitals.

The clitoris was one of the first “sites” that solidified in the process of making this book. When I’m conceptualizing a new image, I usually begin with loose sketches, lists of phrases and words I collect in my research, and conversations with collaborators. When I analyze my scrawlings, I am looking for new bridges and pathways between disparate ideas. The “aha moment” occurs when I find an overlap between two divergent thoughts. I recall one of these moments in a first conversation with Rachel over Zoom. She held up a 3D-printed clitoris, turned it to its side and pointed to a protrusion at the top stating, “This is the beak.”

The winged structure immediately evoked fantastical images of mythological flying creatures and the sleek fluidity of a Zaha Hadid skyscraper. In my final graphite drawing, the clitoris is at the center of an excavated site. Its large bulbous “roots,” otherwise known as the bulbs—which I learned had historically often been omitted from scientific illustrations or considered to belong to the vagina—are visible and pulsing beneath the surface. On the cover of the book we see the same structure silhouetted in the distance, fully uprooted and now liberated as she flies over the landscape. We later dubbed it the “clitoridactyl.”

While it may seem counterintuitive, the vagina was more of a challenge to visualize than the clitoris. I was particularly keen to avoid the clichéd trope of using cut fruit or flowers as a euphemism. At the same time, Armando and I talked about wanting to move away from imagery that painted this powerful, muscular organ as a negative space, or a lack. For centuries, male anatomists had seen the vagina as merely a cave to be inhabited, or—as the Latin name suggests—a sheath for a sword. I knew we could do better.

This illustration, which represents research on duck vaginas by evolutionary biologist 

, offers a new way to think about vaginas (albeit avian ones). Scientists have long expressed awe over the male duck’s unexpectedly long, coiled member. But until Brennan, no one had bothered to examine the female side of things. The duck vagina, she revealed, was a biological marvel: a strategic maze of dead ends and blind pouches that worked to foil the male and render unwanted sperm impotent. It was no one-size-fits-all penis holder, but an organ specially adapted over millennia to execute its own goals.

Given that not all vaginas are quite so, er, oppositional, what could account for the stunning diversity of animal genitals? One explanation in the literature was the idea of “lock-and-key,” a Darwinian maxim that states that males and females of each species evolve so that their genitals fit only into each other’s. It was nature’s form of two-step authentication, a way of telling you that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to proceed. Yet to me, that seemed overly reductive. Once again, it presented the male as the active component (the key), and the female as a  means to an end (the lock).

Armando seized on the imagery of locks and keys, but switched the perspective. We wanted to see what would happen when we centered the female—the “lock”—instead.

I loved the chapter on animal vaginas. I was amazed to learn that certain animals like ducks had evolved complex corkscrew vaginas to block male penises. This image grew out of the “lock-and-key” theory of evolutionary biology, which we agreed to be limiting since it reinforced negative associations with vaginas as passive. Instead, I wanted to reframe this image sans key, and focus on a lock that conveyed the complexity, resilience, and power I found in the duck. As I was developing my idea for this chapter, I thought of that strange scene in Disney’s 

, in which Alice encounters a stubborn, talking doorknob who seems determined to remain locked.

Besides passivity and negative space, another idea that has attached itself to the female body for millennia is purity. The misguided idea that the vagina should be spotlessly clean and sterile is what led to the rise of products like vaginal cleansers, pH “balancers,” and douches—which can in fact strip the vagina of its natural protection, making it more susceptible to disbalance. In this quest for cleanliness, vaginas that teem with life have often been viewed as unhealthy.

But the emerging science of the vaginal microbiome has taught us that a healthy vagina is actually an ecosystem teeming with bacterial communities that work together in harmony. Certain rod-shaped ones, known as lactobacilli, are keystone species, sculpting the environmental niche needed for the vagina to maintain health and balance by spewing out lactic acid.

I felt myself drawn to images that described this intimate ecosystem not as a battleground but as a dynamic garden: a rich mixture of different species, overflowing with weeds and flowers both native and novel. None of these tenants are inherently good or bad; they simply are. Nor is this landscape a static one. The vagina is constantly changing in response to a shifting environment, adapting and righting itself whenever something knocks it off-kilter. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir: your vagina is not a thing; it is a situation. Its resilience is part of its power.

, Rachel painted a dynamic landscape brimming with microbes that nourish, protect, and maintain a balanced ecosystem. I imagined piles of lush flora with squid-like tentacles that reach towards the sky, and deep subterranean roots that weave and sway to an ancient tune. Teams of microbes, like farmers, investigate the land and plant seeds. Their microscopic cranes harvest and delicately rearrange the landscape to reestablish balance in this transforming world.

Down the hill from my studio at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I encountered a curious sculpture: a rock-hard, golden penis balanced on a polished, limestone cube. I later learned the phallic sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, titled “Princess X,” was actually a bust commissioned by Princess Marie Bonaparte. Apparently, it was intended to feature the head, neck and bust of a female client.

 I learned of the real Marie Bonaparte, an early 20th century noblewoman and trailblazing sex researcher. She surveyed hundreds of women and published studies to better understand the clitoris. Ultimately, she even experimented on her own through a series of surgical procedures in a quest towards greater (socially accepted) pleasure.

This sculpture’s likeness to a penis may be mere coincidence, but I was fascinated by the sexual duality embodied by this object. I again encountered this kind of duality in orchids, which contain both male and female sex organs. For Rachel’s final chapter, I wanted to construct an image that also embodied this duality—a monument to our shared anatomy.

The orchid that helped inspire Armando’s final, iconic image has more to offer than meets the eye. In talking to surgeons who perform gender affirmation procedures, I learned the term “orchidectomy,” a procedure which removes the testes. While I’d always thought of these flowers as uniquely vulval in nature, the word “orchid” actually derives from the Latin for testicles, a name that owes to their tuberous roots. Get yourself a plant who can do both!

For me, orchids became a symbol of the blurred—and increasingly blurring—boundaries between the sexes, highlighting how much of this anatomy is actually overlapping. I would later find out that, for this very reason, orchids have become an important symbol of the intersex community. Gender affirmation procedures rely on these inherent similarities to help reshape “male” genitals into “female” ones. In reality, all bodies share the same origin in the womb, the same universal body plan, and deep anatomical similarities that continue into adulthood.

During one of our early brainstorms, Armando said something that stuck with me: “Illustration has no gender.” I realized then that our goal wasn’t necessarily to show these body parts from a “feminine” perspective, whatever that would mean. Nor was it to locate some “pure,” objective, scientific truth within the female body. Acknowledging that science is always done by human beings with distinct values, we sought to re-chart these territories from our own starting point of curiosity and wonder—unbound from past associations, embracing change, and most of all, celebrating the boundless diversity and shared anatomy of 

Rachel E. Gross is an award-winning science journalist who writes about bodies and bias in science and the author of 

Armando Veve is an award-winning illustrator working in Philadelphia. He creates drawings for books, magazines, and public sites across the globe.

13 Ways of Looking: Rachel E. Gross and Armando Veve

Janna Levin

 is the lean distillation of my own strange trip into the universe’s most enigmatic phenomenon. The book is a field guide from a lifetime of thought experiments, explorations of the imagination, and attempts to narrate an encounter with an invisible void.

Dark against a dark sky, black holes are nothing and look like nothing. They are an austere and flawless emptiness, an abyss in spacetime. The death state of the heaviest stars, black holes are themselves no more than a shadow. In the final death throes, collapse is alarmingly swift and inevitable, crushing the stellar plasma to less than a millionth its original expanse until not even its own light can escape. The star continues to fall, leaving behind an archeological imprint in the shape of space, the famed event horizon, a profound and unassailable demarcation in the universe. The star is gone. Only the empty event horizon remains, invisible, unless light rains near enough to cast the shadow. Hence, the irony of trying to visualize them.

My black hole calculations rarely involve words but often involve drawings. I can only calculate on unlined paper and the marks vary in size, getting crisper and relatively smaller (though not objectively small) and more controlled as I rework the ideas through the math. The accompanying images tend to be loose and symbolic but encapsulate entire concepts. After seemingly endless revisions of the calculations and drawings, I then have to recount the experience of that fantastical terrain in a completely different written language.

For the survival guide, I had mock ups of each of the images that formed the pivots of the journey in and around black holes. I drew them by hand infinitely many times and eventually finessed them digitally. Though they were crucial for my experience in these thought-journeys, I did not have the skill or the visual vocabulary to render the drawings coherently or beautifully.

Over too many martinis with my dear friend Lia Halloran, I was lamenting my inability to provide this important aspect of the guide. Lia loves science, loves space, loves time, loves black holes, loves thinking about black holes, loves making me talk about black holes after the aforementioned too-many-martinis. That night, in the bar of the Ace hotel in Manhattan, our collaboration began organically as we plotted out ideas on napkins. Later, under the confines of the pandemic, we worked remotely, looking together at influences Lia gathered until she had created a generous visual complement to my narrated imaginings. I was fascinated by Lia’s process and observed her experimenting until she honed in on a theoretical framework for the paintings. In the continued spirit of our collaboration, Lia describes the process, her many ways of looking, in her own words.

Lia Halloran

I’ve always been intrigued by early images of space exploration, the earnest intent to visualize what our future might look like as explorers. When the opportunity to collaborate with Janna arose, I wanted to reference books and imagery of space travel that gained traction during the 60s in the height of the space race—the more fantastical the better. One of my favorites is 

Beyond Tomorrow: The Next 50 Years in Space

 by Dandridge M. Cole; it’s generously populated with drawings and paintings of self-titled “Space Art” by Roy G. Scarfo. What's so captivating about these images is the fortune-telling, magic-ball-peek into an imagined future.

 and several others like it, including the 

, which contains diagrams and fonts worthy of nostalgic reproduction on posters or t-shirts.

This aesthetic immediately triggers an optimistic message, as if passed through time: 

the future will be so much better, look where our curiosity can take us.

 One of the last chapters is titled “Improvements in Man” (and to no one's surprise, there are only men featured), which contains a curious illustration depicting “Saucer Men,” accompanied by a text presenting the good news that artificial organs will be so sublimely superior 50 years into the future that all will we need is our heads. While we may look at these images now as simply whimsical or entertaining (wow, they got a lot wrong), when these were drafted there was a collective feeling that the future was rapidly upon us as we advanced to colonize space.

Perhaps this will be how the work I’ve created for 

 will be seen in the future as we learn more and more about wildly fascinating black holes; that my attempt to visualize a black hole close up will, in time, seem outdated, revealing the shortcomings of what we know now vs. what we will know in the future.

While many of the paintings I made were a nod to these early drawings and diagrams of space travel, the size of the book was also a fantastic and subtle way to trigger nostalgia. The book is pocket-sized, there's an intimacy and familiarity to its scale—something like an old field guide you'd carry on you while hiking. I would have loved if the book contained a built-in bookmark and band you see on Moleskin notebooks, as if your survival of a black hole was dependent on the current passage you were reading in the book.

13 Ways of Looking: Kaveh Akbar