This book was absurd. Far more absurd than the blurb on the back led me to believe. I did not expect a book about Valerie Solanas when I picked it up. That was a surprise, and the good kind. I would recommend this book to anyone willing to talk seriously about absurd things and laugh at serious things. Someone for which gender is a mindfuck.
That was all I’d jotted down as a review of this, last year: “funny, vague, clever”.
Vague? I meant it, strangely, as a compliment. The declarations are bold. From the first page, Andrea Long Chu arrays her arguments on a sweeping, jokey surge: “Everyone is female […] There are no good female poets, simply because there are no good poets.”
For a short book, Females is dense with points. Much is blunted in the rush. Beats are firmly met (or, if hard to pinpoint, are kept to), yet transition is a constant; text supple within constraints, and still its reach broad or deep or precipitously high, in the manner of a (complex) wave. It can’t sustain itself at the extremes (and doesn’t try to, hovers without overstaying, inertia impelling), but supports itself up there, however insubstantially.
