Cass Eddington

“[Kempe’s] fanaticism for achieving sainthood and erotic consummation with Jesus mirrors that of Glück’s impossible (because unrequited) love for his lover L. No stranger to fanaticism (cf. a settler-colonialist pioneer ancestry based in narratives of martyrdom and self-abnegation), I recognize it in writing poetry, in withholding my labor from the adjunctification I am too familiar with, in withdrawing my body from cis-heteronormative expectations. Acts of rewriting and forms of refusal require excessive enthusiasm, a necessary dumb faith in order to imagine alternatives.”