170 x 208mm, 44 pages, Black and white printing, Staple bound, 2021

They say we aren’t built for it. This species or another.

Crewcut & fatigued, a swollen head on the box says thin-lipped,

When most people talk about killing,

they are like virgins talking about sex.

Experiential and mapped, VIRGINS takes us on car rides, through hotel rooms and up close to meat viscera and enamel structures. Oscillating through binaries, concepts of innocence and experience are dragged by their creaturely haunches by ‘gathered clumps’ of characters who play, fight, bathe, fuck and browse on the burning pyre of old ideas.

‘VIRGINS is a mnemonic playlist in the washer-dryer drum-hum of trial and error; the experiment in Poetry of poetry’s worldliness, debauchery, and angst. If we “walk the broken line,” as JD suggests, it’s something we do together through underground and under-resourced subculture formations. These are poems to take with you and read aloud in transit, in public spaces, or quietly to your ride and die comrades. These are poems for the real ones.’

—Ziddy Ibn Sharam

Jesse Darling is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, sound and performance. They live and work in Berlin, and have received commissions from MoMA Warsaw, The Serpentine Gallery, London, and Volksbühne, Berlin, among others. Drawing on personal experiences as well as history and counter histories, their work addresses the fallibility, adaptability and vulnerability of living being, societies and technologies: the condition of being a body caught in the structures of the social and material world.

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