Garments Against Women

2018 Whiting Award Winner

Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women’s and children’s lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It’s a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival’s requisite thoughts.

“Her lists of imaginary books, of real dreams, of embarrassing feelings, of not-writings participate, to borrow language from Sedgewick, in ‘the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world.” Ava Kofman, at Feministing

“Does one have to be a ‘property owner’ to make ‘literature’? Write memoirs? Poetry? These are perverse questions, perhaps, but they are Boyer’s, and should be ours. This is a deeply, quietly, savagely perverse book, ‘perverse’ in the sense of turning away: from the given, the mandated; from ‘things conferring authority,’ the logic of property, capital, productivity, the obligation to be happy, to be ‘working on yourself,’ to want things. A writerly book about refusals and failures, it entertains ‘the refusal of accounting altogether,’ of any making-good-on (promise, investment, children, one’s own talents, opportunities, indeed, life). Accounting ‘gives the wrong forms to desire,’ Boyer suggests. This is a book of poetry (or is it lyric prose? Essay? Must one decide?) that also turns away from poetry: It has no interest in meter or prosody per se — rather, it is interested in the measuring of thought and feeling, in a slow amazing and amazed rendering of the negative space of official life.” Maureen N. McLane, in The New York Times

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. GARMENTS AGAINST WOMEN is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms--like garments and literature--are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women's and children's lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It's a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival's requisite thoughts.

Anne Boyer was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1973, grew up in Salina, Kansas, and was educated in the public libraries and universities of Kansas. She lives on the eastern edge of Kansas with her daughter, Hazel. Her works include Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse, Selected Dreams with a note on phrenology, The Romance of Happy Workers, Art is War, My Common Heart, and The 2000s. Her writing has also been translated in Turkish, Greek, Dutch, and Icelandic: a chapbook called A Form of Sabotage was published in Turkey in the spring of 2013.