'Turn the pages of Selfless and you'll find yourself grimacing at the systems of body. More pointedly, the ways culture and society have failed to lighten the load on the body-ness of women's bodies. Ergo we are set up to fail as we lighten. Zoe Dzunko is a poet of magnificent range, one who can brutalize prosody with a couplet exchange like Selfless's opening poem "The Impossible, III": "The time you fucked / my face it felt like a feather." The deadening exactitude of that period only magnifies her world-weary wretchedness, achieving in its muscular reaches, a new center of gravity. In this manner, it performs a cheeky dance of selfie selflessness.' (Publication summary)
'Since the late 1970s Warren Motte, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, has been collecting mirror scenes in literature, a studiously archived assembly of ‘moments when a subject glimpses himself or herself in the mirror.’ From an analysis of these more than 10,000 scenes collated in Mirror Gazing (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014) Motte suggests that in such instances ‘a curious effect of dissociation seems to be at work, for the face in the mirror typically presents itself to the subject with its otherness prominently on display’; the reflection becomes ‘the deforming mirror of another’s gaze.’' (Introduction)
'Since the late 1970s Warren Motte, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, has been collecting mirror scenes in literature, a studiously archived assembly of ‘moments when a subject glimpses himself or herself in the mirror.’ From an analysis of these more than 10,000 scenes collated in Mirror Gazing (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014) Motte suggests that in such instances ‘a curious effect of dissociation seems to be at work, for the face in the mirror typically presents itself to the subject with its otherness prominently on display’; the reflection becomes ‘the deforming mirror of another’s gaze.’' (Introduction)
