Emily Brandt: The book felt very nourishing, like a meal, in part because of the visual elements. There’s also so much narrative and so much rich language. As a writer, you’re creating this form and moving through it so beautifully and challenging so many of our ideas of what a mother is, what a child is, what violence is, what nonviolence is, what a book of poems can do. I had a student who was wearing to school yesterday this t-shirt that had a blonde woman in her underwear pointing a gun at whoever. I said to him, “I’m kind of offended” and he said, “It’s about power though. This is about power.” So I said, “Yeah well, her mouth is open, she’s naked,” and he was like, “But she’s got some power.” So then I showed him your book and he flipped through it and read a little of it and handed it back to me and said, “Miss, it’s the same thing.” So how is this book not the same thing as his shirt? Or is it?
Montana Ray: That’s the best question I think I’ve ever been asked. I think there is probably some sort of relationship there because I feel like the book does glamorize violence. It doesn’t show you how fucking fucked up it actually is, and it can’t because it’s a representation. It’s about a play therapy kind of world. But the book isn’t really selling anything. Because it’s outside of the pop culture market, maybe it gets away with some stuff that otherwise it would be more accountable for. But I think the whole book is about that, about film. There is a poem in there about a woman—”(una pistola) (bajo el vestido)”—in front of a camera with her shirt undone holding a machine gun on an album cover, and the complexities of that situation. Because she also has a gun below her slip for at night when she’s in bed for her pinché lover, uncle, guardian. So there is this duality of a glamorous vision of a woman with a gun during the daytime on an album cover, versus the threat of actual violence and a woman using a gun as self-projection against male sexual aggression.
–From Emily Brandt’s interview of Montana Ray at Weird Sister
