American Book Review’s special on “Intersex Writing” features an in-depth review of Aaron Apps’s Intersex (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2015), thanks to reviewer Eric Longfellow.
Here’s a taste:
[W]e move through an achronological history of Apps’s encounters with various forms of violence both biological and not, both conscious and not, both insistent and not. Oftentimes these violences interweave…. And this blends into graphic vignettes involving live alligators, diarrhea in department store bathrooms, domesticity, dissected animals, and the medicalization of sex…. Apps’s hybrid work extends beyond the lyrical and textual… It’s a movement between discourses that refuses to settle, but it’s also an abandonment of sorts, a style of writing unafraid of failure and therefore willing to employ risk as a model for confronting violence, living with it, learning from it.