This is not another essay about Kathy Acker. It’s about the body and language, reps and repetition—about writing’s relationship to the refrain, what is recited, the reps of language and the rhythms of temporality, its tempos and time signatures, its rush.

We urgently need contemporary, cross-generational stories, told by people without power, full of complex and complicated ecosystems, humans, and companion species.

The trite aestheticization of pain as image, as representation without source, undermines the nuanced interplay between material culture and subjectivity, trauma and shelter.

Maybe we share these images because we are anxious.