Idiophone

Idiophone came to us via Elena Passarello who said it was so much funnier and weirder (and more musical!) than most essay being published today. And she’s right-Amy has a distinctively forthcoming, humorous voice, and she’s honest about anxieties and obsessions that others might veil in lyricism or circumnavigate altogether.

The essay offers leaps that feel both unexpected and then, after the fact, obvious, which is such an exciting quality. From the Nutcracker (and its opposition with Tchaikovsky’s opera) to idiophones themselves, there’s so much to be interested in, and these fascinations do so much work as modes for thinking.

This is lyric essay at its freshest and best, taking on motherhood/daughterhood, artmaking and the judgment of artistic value, queerness, consumerism, being a woman in publishing, addiction and alcoholism, writing as a profession or industry, caregiving

Essaying about art, and in a pleasurable (not dry) way has become part of the CHP brand (Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong, Prententiousness, Little Boxes), and this extends that with a distinctly feminist bent.