MY PLEASURE by Irene Silt
150 x 230mm, 80 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, softcover, 2022
Precise, astute, and uncompromising in its nuance, My Pleasure lives in the poetic entanglements of pleasure, disgust, and agency. From the bed to the club, the coal mine, the power plant, and the jail cell, Silt asks: Where do we extract pleasure, and what pleasure do we find in extraction? Is there sex without work, or only before, during, and after? Unfurling the binary distinctions between freedom and control, language and pause, and mind and body, My Pleasure does not imagine a different world so much as it embodies the possibility of another order within this one.
"I cannot fully describe the ways this incredible book moves me. Each time I read Irene Silt’s My Pleasure it continues to pull me deeper into an understanding of my own body and its daily navigation of trauma, work, loss, sex, and the family. For the whores, 'the destroyers of time,' the family is the psychosocial unit, which measures everything defined and excluded by it, along with all the forms of pleasurable relation made possible outside of it. It is this outside that allows Silt to ask, 'What is deeper in life than just wanting to live?' What would it mean to harness the power of our perceptual modes beyond reason or knowing, beyond executing every act with the cautionary skill of only being 'a woman out of convenience'? It’s almost as if this book moves in me. It rests inside of me, languidly—like a fist, or rage, or self-loathing—until it can be released through the fluidity of desire, a liberatory lubrication that recognizes, 'Sex will be something we do together to do everything else we need to do in the world.'" Cassandra Troyan
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