Annie Godfrey Larmon
In the pages of her recent chimeric collection, Like A Woman, poet and critic Quinn Latimer offers essays, poems, lists, and missives penned since 2010. The result is a critical memoir interleaved with texts on a pantheon of women artists and writers including Etel Adnan, Chantal Akerman, Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marguerite Duras, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, and the writer’s mother, Blake Latimer. Together, these contributions reflect on (and demonstrate) critical lineage and influence, just as they consider the boons and failings of feminisms. Along the way, Latimer reckons with such mercurial topics as language 
“Regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all,” explains the unnamed narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel Pond, which leaves us in the idle hands of a woman who has abandoned academe and retreated, alone, to a stone cottage in the Irish countryside. Here, she has given herself over to a ripe compulsion to grammatize her experience of the world. “I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” For the time being, she writes in