What Are You

Radically imaginative and intense, challenging language to be slow and fast, soft and hard, drunk and sober, What Are You performs its own destruction and recreation. Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction—going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back. EXCERPT “You exist in an endless series of iterations. You keep spinning out and out and out. Sometimes you take the form of a person and people, but you don’t stop there. You are the places where people go to enact every hidden, silent fantasy—the cruelty and the beauty too—and you are the fantasies themselves, and the economies that shape and regulate them. In my dreams I never fly, but I do breathe underwater.”