Within the contours of TENDER lie field notes from a life lived across multiple affinities, kinship, and desires. Equally visual and textual, TENDER is a beautifully complex collection of experiences and reflections spanning thirty years of curious inquiry into our shared human-animal condition. Laiwan's book traverses diverse terrains – the body, land, language. It is rooted in her courageous and uncompromising history of activism and in experiences of building community across and beyond difference. TENDER offers a radical and decolonizing cleansing of all that oppresses and alienates.
The words and images of this collection reveal the heroic struggles of gendered, raced, and sexual differences from a place of incredible tenderness and vulnerability. Laiwan’s words imprint in us the need to breathe our animal skins back to life after the scarring of dehumanized, fearful states of abandonment and betrayal. Read as a retrospective and as a continued call for a passionate caring for one another, TENDER offers us freedom in the face of limitation: a working at setting free. Each section of the book captures a moment in time and feeling. Haunting, political, and defiantly sexy, Laiwan’s voice is a guiding force. Ghostly images are choreographed to leave us alerted to longing and hope, absence and presence. It is as if the entire collection were a garden at different stages of growth, with the inevitable decay and renewal that each season brings.
In Laiwan’s imaginings readers retreat and renew our courage to speak – and breathe – anew.
Оглавление
Laiwan. TENDER
ADVANCED PRAISE FOR LAIWAN’S TENDER
3247
TENDER
Contents
Page List
Landmarks
FOREWORD
on heroics
feeling
voice of the body
heroic action
heroic icon
defiance
back to body
feeling again
notes towards a body I
a mythology from the earth
untitled I
LUNG:towards embodying
ode to a ferocious thistle*
untitled II
notes towards a body II
to gut and a rise
September fourth two thousand and two
September fifth two thousand and two
what is a park
whale
untitled III
thieves 1, 2, 3, 4 and tender 5
thieves
thieves
thieves
thieves
tender
she who had scanned the flower of the world*
IMAGE CREDITS
TEXT CREDITS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS
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Thank you for purchasing and reading Tender.
If you came across this ebook by some other means, feel free to purchase it and support our hard work. It is available through most major online ebook retailers and on our website. The print edition is also available.
.....
— Mariana Romo-Carmona, author of Sobrevivir y otros complejos: Narrative Poems in Englillano and Speaking like an Immigrant
Where most may grow weary, Laiwan takes the tensions that shape tenderness as a point from which to begin to feel, think, and hold personal histories and colonial legacies at once. To hold, and to let go of when necessary. TENDER questions the points at which habituated rhythms become challenged by unnamed desires. The necessity to actively divert mediocrity and boredom; refusing ease in order to embody a tangle of stories across oceans.