“A Girl is a Gun”

On Kate Zambreno’s “Toilet Bowl”

This little chapbook — purchased at McNally-Jackson in Soho and identified as Guillotine series #3 — is a ferocious blast of rage and poetry from feminist writer and artist Kate Zambreno, the author of the memoir Heroines. In fifty numbered segments ranging n length from a few words to a full paragraph, Zambreno sets out a collage-like examination of the emotional and psychological sources of her writing life, from a formal aesthetic of “the abjective correlative” to the need to express one’s rage, violence, and hatred of limitations, even if the result is a “grotesque blob of emotions.” The result is frightening and exhilarating, a white-hot blast of pure feminist rage, allusive, bitter, and stark, a celebration of wanting “to write the revolt… to write the revolting” from one who “too was a rage-filled teenager, an alienated cheerleader.” Most definitely worth seeking out.