On Getting What I Want

Willa Smart

'Willa Smart says A body isn’t beautiful because of its skin but because it might be opened. Abjection stands on its head and abduction tops from the bottom. By tops, I mean speaks, or rather interprets, where spectacle can be measured with the tongue. Smart’s entrancing hanging paragraphs create a kind of negative space of water and light-filled air and the intriguing possibilities of opening holes. A hole is a multiplicand of wishes.' –Robert Glück

'On Getting What I Want is for lovers who know better. Think Plato’s Phaedrus but it’s Willa in a meadow with the sky and the plants and the stones all together hacking the tragedy of requited love into a new cosmology of sex and nonreciprocity. How much recognition can we really bear? These pages fuck, infect, suck, bleed, and think all at the same time. Smart gives us a queer method of hunger that knows the irrelevance of satiation. Read it like a textbook.' –Rosie Stockton