Middle Time

A meditation on the body amidst a crisis of environment, Middle Time imagines the contours and limits (or non-limits) of bodies at a time when our attachments and our ecologies are increasingly administered, exploited, and degraded. How in particular, asks Middle Time, might one write the feminine body in ways that avoid essentializing women’s experiences of toxicity and risk, while also acknowledging a very real history of patriarchal subjection of women’s bodies to the same? At times choral lament, at times lyric trace of individual witness, the book’s voices point toward the question of what it means to be in the middle (the title of one series), pushing back against the often totalizing rhetoric of end times. While borrowing from and undermining the languages of poetry, philosophy, science, and medicine, Middle Time reaches toward a lyric of resurgent desire for a dire yet resilient present.