Laura’s Desires

Laura’s Desires blasts open the possessive suffix in its own title, showing us how desire is never one’s own insofar as it always belongs to someone else–a lover’s gaze, an imagined other. The ever-deferred answer to the question “what do you want?” moves this unnerving inquiry into a politics of feminist desire that finds liberation in its own dependency. What I love most is the way the book braids together the language of criticism and autobiography into a third, more luminous prose, one through which, at the edge of sleep, a softer, more permeable self is restored to the collective where it belongs.

What a dull world we’d have to put up with if desire didn’t mean too much! Laura Henriksen’s lust for life leads her into reverie. In a magnificent pair of philosophical poem-essays, Henriksen twangs the elastics that stretch from the subject to God, from want to social possibility, from peat moss to sexed being. As the detente that paused the sex wars collapses, I’m personally grateful that Henriksen is on the side of women who fuck and think about it.