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Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

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Nelson's examination of the women of the NY School is not a distaff analysis, but a critical dilation of an otherwise false whole -- it is a book to be written on, and in, with the great joy that comes from great discovery.

Award finalist poet Maggie Nelson presents Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions, an in-depth contemplation of women in and connected to the New York School of Poets from the 1950s to the present. Analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as feminist insights into a number of male New York School writers and artists offer new interpretations of issues of anonymity vs. publicity, solitary vs. communal existence, enduring vs. ephemeral aspects of life, domesticity, boredom, inspiration, sex, and politics. Above all, Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstrictions strives to have the reader reconsider the concepts of "schools" or "avant-garde", cutting down to the fundamental questions: why do we read, and how do our gender and sexuality affect our interpretations of what we read? "If there's one thing Mayer's work has to impart, it is a promotion of the paradoxical value of the gratuitous itself. To allow for this paradox - to pay attention to it, to admire it - is to salute that which is unpaid, uncalled for, unjustifiable, and, in a complex sense of the word, free." A small handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this thoughtful analysis, including an unusual gelatin silver print of a man masturbating.