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by Jen de Gregorio (Author)
What to Wear Out is a poetry collection that offers a portrait of a mind corseted by the pathological norms of patriarchy, white femininity, and the neoliberal notion of happiness as a project of capitalist consumption. Through lyrics and docupoetry-which remixes language from government records, testimony, and other found texts-readers observe the speaker of these poems in the process of emerging from her own predicament. Understanding herself as both an agent and a product of history and culture, the speaker struggles to resist and discard limiting beliefs and social practices while searching for new, more ethical ways of relating to the self, others, and the natural world. Escapism-the desire to "knock ourselves out" with drinking, shopping, media, or sex-remains a constant lure as she contends with an overwhelming set of crises: interpersonal and state violence, environmental devastation, the Covid-19 pandemic, and an increasingly fascistic national culture in which the line between reality and political "theater" has all but disappeared. What to Wear Out dramatizes one mind's unweaving while exploring the difficulties of reckoning with the harm that we have done to one another, of moving from a position of insular self-protection to one of openness and collective possibility.
