To Go Without Blinking

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Aimee Herman is a cyborg. Not in the sense of a mixture but: in her impetus. Her desire for a book to be a new kind of thinking and being in the world. As she writes in the startling Statement of Poetics that opens this passionate collection: 'This body of text practices trilingualism and contraction. Theories include gender confiscation and syntax dissection.' I liked that. A syntax that records what happens to a body even more than the words themselves. And that's just page one. Throw away 'the color pink, ' writes Herman, deeper in. And: 'Gender is best received in a question mark.' In not with. I loved that. This is re-wiring where it counts: below the lexicon. Below the public-private register: 'where the label was rubbed.' Until there's nothing left but, as the writer says: 'The most dangerous parts of me.' What those 'dangerous parts' become, reconfigured, mutilated and grown again, is the text of this 'sore' and 'feminine' book. A book in which 'words' and beloveds, of various kinds: 'never stop coming.' What kind of cyborg is this?--Bhanu Kapil

Aimee Herman's TO GO WITHOUT BLINKING is a visceral, wide eyed, queer movement that creates 'sturdy retinas' in those of us who participate. As we enter and perform this book by way of our bodies (our inhabitation) we are nervy-aghast, gasping, slobbering, terrified, aroused. Oh the confessions here--not only the confessions themselves, but the quality of confession amid the varying grits of the unveiled body. This is not a book of the stellar body. It is the core, guttural relation of body to page--it is body and page as planar path, 'leaking teeth'--'a need to disrobe to satisfy.' Herman has shown us an unabridged vista of spaces and scenes where power, colonization, detriments and desires are exchanged. Nothing is held back here. We are cut by this book. We are conflated. We are ruined in the best possible ways. TO GO WITHOUT BLINKING's 'tongue is too big for [its] body' and this is where its genius is.--j/j hastain