Since the 1990s, especially, literature and film has seen a growing group of inspiring female auteurs. If we were to look back to earlier female versions, we could perhaps cite Katy Acker or Mary Gaitskill (different writers but joined in their misanthropy). In France, the novels and films of punk auteur Virginie Despentes are notable, with Baise Moi particularly affecting (albeit disliked by many as indulgent and supposedly misogynistic).
It is difficult to think of male writers who are comparable in their (subtle) brutalism, although perhaps the queer writer Dennis Cooper1 is an analogue. His depictions of male sexual and erotic fantasy look back to Genet and Pasolini, but with a contemporary (late) neo-capitalist surface. In each case, I would argue (from Gaitskill through to Despentes and even Cooper) that there is an ethical vision at work, albeit a very iconoclastic and relentless one. This is ethics as brutal truth-telling, disavowing self-deception and our constant tendency to lie to others (what Sartre called our mauvaise foi) for our convenience. Give me lazy convenience or give me death2? Death, thanks. The either/or choice is not an arbitrary one, as for Sartre it was the cloying small lies and cowardice of the everyday and of ordinary people which allowed the Nazis to take control of French society in the 1940s. We could argue that we are witnessing a similar somnambulism, as in the late 1930s, into authoritarian and fascistic societies in 2025.
Thankfully, specific artists and poets mark their resistance. In May 2025, I took a visit to the Hayward Gallery in London to see a double exhibition of female artists (Thomas 2025, Linder 2025). The vision of Black American feminist educator bell hooks (hooks 2001) was cited as especially important for the second exhibition although, for me, hooks’ enabling philosophy was present in both. The dual show combined African-American artist Mickalene Thomas and post-punk seminal artist Linder to powerful affect. A review of the dual exhibition (Judah 2025) foregrounds the transformative power of female artistry and candour of voice and image across the two works.
Thomas’ exhibition overtly namechecks bell hooks’ text All About Love (hooks 1999), which argues for the importance of love, whether sacred, familial, social or romantic. For hooks, the invitation to cherish love had a political imperative: ‘I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood’ (quoted Judah 2025). In 2025 America and beyond, these words seem to have a powerful resonance which connects the individual situation to the wider society predicament. Without love, what happens to the human individual and to human society? Thomas’ exhibition draws out the especially acute (racist) implications for the black community in America, and especially for black women. Thomas reflects on the way black women have been pictured – or not. The black female figure is often marginalised in art or else presented as naked and available as ’exotic’ objects of desire. The singer Eartha Kitt features in two central works, including an audio where Kitt describes being cast out of her family, her early years of service and abuse, and the love that evaded her (Judah 2025, Thomas 2025); ‘There were plenty of men who wanted to lay me down, but none who wanted to raise me up’.
But the thrust of Thomas’ exhibition is in the opposite direction, a full-frontal joyous assault on patriarchy and its racist expressions. Four screens in one section of the gallery show Kitt, Thomas and two other black women singing Angelitos Negros, styled and filmed as though all were performing in the 1960s. As the glorious pop music permeates the gallery, Kitt weeps as she sings and the overall impact is extraordinary. I found myself having to sit down and cry, only to look up to find several others doing exactly the same, while smiling together at the sense of uplift and affirmation the experience gave us all. The voices of the black female singers implore artists to paint ‘black angels’ into church interiors and to be done with the hegemony of the white figures. Hear, hear!
Danger Came Smiling, an exhibition by Linder (Linder 2025), the neo-feminist Northern English post-punk artist, runs concurrently. It’s a surprising juxtaposition, but on closer inspection, makes total sense. Linder has been risking her own self and her own body in her experimental and iconoclastic punk art, mostly collage, since the 1970s (she first came to attention working on the Buzzcocks’ cover for the 7” of Orgasm Addict). Both artists are involved in dissecting the feminine image. Both work with soft-porn and fashion photographs. Both use their own body.
As with Thomas, there is a simultaneous joy and sorrow manifest in these works. We might think of Nan Goldin’s ’this is not a bleak world, but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection’, from her own extraordinary book of photography, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (quoted in Weinberg 2005). Linder intermixes pleasure and pain, of the most personal kind. Some of her photographic canvases, for example, depict the pornographic fetish of sploshing food on her lovers but this is also a reference to the caring for her elderly (dying) parents and to the soft foods with which elderly people can be spoon-fed. The canvases are certainly erotic, but there is a tenderness and a kindness about the way the bodies hug and caress, which is also simply a depiction of vulnerability and care. But as Judah notes, Linder is perhaps more ‘frequently brutal’ than Thomas (’the results are frequently brutal’ [Judah 2025]. She hasn’t lost her punk anger which she seems to particularly express in the romantic scenes. A woman leaning to embrace a man instead jams a fork into her eye. A ‘perfect’ Aryan athlete transforms into a piece of industrial furniture. We might say that in very different ways, both Thomas and Linder have answered the Sartrean accusation of bad faith, or of lying to oneself or to others. Both exhibitions tell the difficult truth, a rarity in these times.
Recent chapbooks from Red Ogre Review analogously highlight a seminal female poetic voice which brooks no compromise. Sadie Maskery’s The Usual Apologies (Maskery 2025) is a case in point. Katie Beswick’s Plumstead Pram Pushers (Beswick 2025) and Devon Fulford’s gulp (Fulford 2025) inhabit a related, if distinct, space of what one might refer to as neo-feminist poetry and prose.
The Usual Apologies
In conversation with Sadie Maskery, the author clarified some of the context for this work. I first asked her about the rationale for the cover image: ‘Many poetry books have covers (and insides) that attempt to demonstrate vast depths of profundity. This cover is not that’. This seems a fair response. But the author also linked it to the concept for the title: ‘The collection is called The Usual Apologies, because anyone who knows me in real life knows that my default reply is always “Sorry.” But Poetry Me is a braver creature with fewer constraints, so there are the usual apologies, but it hasn’t stopped me writing rude words and flicking a V sign’.
The text itself is unapologetic in moving between contexts of relationship, but also subversive in introducing the potential complexity of every situation. ‘Preloved’ kicks us off as readers with the image of a ‘daughter student move’. Suddenly, mid-point, there is a shift of emphasis as a ‘stray tissue in one pocket / in the other, a business card / Rape Crisis / The one the nice nurse gives you, the police, the clinic’ takes us into a more ominous space (Maskery 2025). ‘Therapy’ foregrounds a female friendship that seems to go more bi-sexual (but without a happy ending); ‘I might be bi / and I was like / Oh! Have you ever . . . been . . . with a woman?’ (Maskery 2025) while ‘Lolita’ seems to flirt with something somewhat different (ooer!). ‘Dream Town: Above’ finds our protagonist dating; ‘I dated a foley artist from Felchingham /Passionate but brief / He said the sounds of our love would win an award / so I let him press record’ (Maskery 2025). We are left wondering if this is just audio, or are video visuals allowed too?
In conversation, the author contextualised some of the frisson of these pages. ‘Someone wrote that my poetry was a glimpse into my slightly worrying world". It’s worrying, but my understanding of normality. There are monsters under the bed. It’s how to interact with them that’s the challenge. There is no sharp border between reality and imagination’. Or as ‘Care’ has it, ‘There’s a hole in those socks / but no point buying him new’ (Maskery 2025).
But what about the dreaded L-word? According to bell hooks, ‘The word love is most often defended as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb’ (hooks 2001). This could be a bit like Sartre saying ’the human being is the sum of its actions (not just its intentions and words)’ (think of the French ordinary complicity with the Nazis, for example). Love is all about action, just like fighting the fascists. Don’t just say you are against Nigel Farage, do something about it.
But this means something else as well, I think. If love is a verb, this means that love must be translated into reality, into the mess of our lives and the complexity that surrounds us and our myriad genealogies. It can’t be just a utopia; love must work on dreary Monday mornings in the rain, just as it can flourish on the beaches of the Med in steamy July evenings. Thankfully, Maskery has learnt this lesson as well as the rest of us. In one of the final poems of this collection, ‘I Can Touch Love and That Is Good’, the poet tells us ‘Love, love, aye, I said, didn’t I / I’m aff, ma arse is hanging oot’ (Maskery 2025). In other words, romance saves the day but (this time) in the real fucking world, baby. Utopia may be bust, but, frankly, so what!
In correspondence, the author tells me that ‘[l]ove may also have an element of horror and humour. Erotic love is a fucking awful thing, no less wonderful for that. Like any drug, the rush, the highs and lows the first time are all-consuming because you have never felt them before. What’s the line in the Peggy Lee song? “I thought I would die. But I didn’t.” This is a truly great collection of poems, brave and funny. Highly recommended.
gulp
This poetic dynamic, both tender and teak tough, also resonates with Fulford, for example. In an interview with Teague Bohlen, Fulford outlines how ‘writing is so cathartic . . . so many times, the impetus for the act of writing itself is pain’ (quoted in Bohlen 2025). Fulford’s collection of poetry, gulp, is a punk-scene, sexually-driven, coming-of-age collection set in small-town Colorado (Fulford 2025). As with Maskery’s collection of poems, this is also a dexterous and complex, subtle artistic expression. ‘But I’m also still that punk-music girl thumbing her nose at authority. I’ve always kind of had that fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me attitude’ (quoted in Bohlen 2025). I am reminded of Gee Vaucher’s punk neo-feminist vision (which I wrote about in the last Red Ogre Review issue). What characterised that aesthetic as singular was that ‘first that “we meant what we said” and second, that “what we said came from a much deeper force than it appeared to have” [Vaucher and Rimbaud 2016: 120].
I think we can say something analogous about the anti-authority female poetics of Maskery and of Fulford, as we can say about that of Vaucher; although it shows all the deprivations, the horrors, etc. of the era… at the same time it projects through its love and its care, through its precision, through its beauty, something else’ [Vaucher and Rimbaud 2016: 120]. It is this something else (somewhat vulnerable, ambiguous, conflictual and confusing – but also wonderful) that we need to both valorise as we find it in new expressions of contemporary creativity (often on the margins) but also to cultivate and to support. Onwards and upwards for the poetry underground!
In tribute to the female auteurs discussed in this essay and in a spirit of inter-gender dialogue, I conclude with two short poems of my own which foreground the attempt at mutual understanding, but also (difficult and uneasy) mutual reading.
Women Who Read Bukowski
I’d imagine are so tired
Of apologizing,
Say, I’ve got my own mind
And reading between the lines
I see a different guy
More self-admittedly weak
And it’s also obvious that
Charles loves women, isn’t it just,
If not always in the best of ways, eh?
Men Who Read Mary Gaitskill
Get shot at from both sides:
Sure, it’s good you read
Women, but c’mon, not that kind
And from men:
So, what the hell do you think
Reading women writers?
What gives? When there’s a bloomin’
Near-War going on out there?
Footnotes
1.I try to capture a glimpse of the specific achievements of Cooper’s writings in a short metafiction text ‘Interview with Dennis Cooper’ in Irwin, Jones Deep Image (Tofu Ink Press 2025). ‘Studying Cooper was not an exact science’.
2.The phrase is my pilfering from the title of a Dead Kennedys album. Cf. Dead Kennedys Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death (Alternative Tentacles 1987).
Figures
1.Cover art for The Usual Apologies by Sadie Maskery (Red Ogre Review 2025).
2.Cover art for gulp by Devon Fulford (Red Ogre Review 2024).
References
Beswick, Katie (2025) Plumstead Pram Pushers. Red Ogre Review, Los Angeles.
Bohlen, Teague (2025) ‘Interview with Devon Fulford: Fort Collins Professor’s New Book Explores Sex and Hunger’. Westword, Denver.
Fulford, Devon (2025) gulp. Red Ogre Review, Los Angeles.
hooks, bell (2001) All About Love. Harper Collins, New York.
Irwin, Jones (2024) American Haikus. Moonstone Press, Philadelphia.
Irwin, Jones (2025) Deep Image. Tofu Ink Press, San Francisco.
Judah, Hettie (2025) ‘Review of All About Love and Danger Came Smiling’. Guardian, London.
Linder (2025) Danger Came Smiling. Hayward Gallery, London.
Maskery, Sadie (2025) The Usual Apologies. Red Ogre Review, Los Angeles.
Thomas, Mickalene (2025) All About Love. Hayward Gallery, London.
Weinberg, J. (2005) Fantastic Tales: The Photography of Nan Goldin. Tate Publishing, London.