Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist. Her books include The Romance of Happy
Workers (Coffee House Press, 2006), My Common Heart (Spooky Girlfriend
Press, 2011), Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press, 2015), which won
the 2016 CLMP Firecracker award, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), and a memoir, The Undying (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), a finalsit for the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. With Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig,
she has translated the work of 20th-century Venezuelan poets Victor Valera
Mora, Miguel James, and Miyo Vestrini. With K. Silem Mohammad, she was a
founding editor of the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln. Her essays have appeared
in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. She is the recipient of the
2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, a 2018 Whiting Award in Poetry and Nonfiction, the 2018-19 Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in Poetry at Cambridge University, and a 2020 Windham Campbell Prize in Nonfiction.
Boyer was born in Kansas and is a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.
She lives in Kansas City, Missouri.
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Garments Against Women
There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.
Garments Against Women: -
Garments Against Women
I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.
The back matter of the book will only say this: If a woman has no purse, we will imagine one for her.
Garments Against Women: -
Garments Against Women
I thought to want regard was to want scorpions in your shower. I thought to speak was to ask for a muzzle. I thought to feel or to show you feel was to ask a sadist to make you flail. I thought to have a name was to have oneself abstracted and abstracted again into many bodies, some actual and corporeal or some ghostly or whiffs or some so strange, so far from you, they might as well be astral. I thought to have a name was to become an object. I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.
Garments Against Women:
“[Boyer] has written a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of literature and of life itself. This sounds dry, abstract: It's not. Boyer's book moves as if the contents of a brokenhearted country song were mediated through the ferocious mind of a Hannah Arendt...This is a book of poetry...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, The New York Times Book Review [on Garments Against Women]
“Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women is a deeply intellectual book with purpose; it widens the boundaries of poetry and memoir as we know them.” —Chris Stroffolino, The Rumpus
“. . . Anne Boyer gives us beautifully intense, sprawling, and always surprising prose poems on poverty, pain, happiness, unhappiness, writing poetry, not writing poetry, sewing, thrift shops, shopping, karaoke, the internet — in other words life — and the particular struggle to find poetry in the everyday. Garments Against Women is an intimate, courageous, and ultimately joyful examination of poetic inspiration in America at this exact moment.” —Tim Nolan, author of The Field
Selected Works
A searing passion and fierce wit roar beneath the intellectual rigor in Anne Boyer’s work; it looks cool but is hot to the touch. Garments Against Women reveals the spaces women are encouraged to conceal. Its stylistic austerity inspires a feeling very close to the sublime. Her work unsettles all the familiar shapes of memoir and poetry to build a new city, one where worn ideas of labor and creativity are a monument toppled in the square.