Some three weeks later, the artist has gone. Her works remain. Inside the glass pavilion is a writer. She is watching the light brushing against the copper: staining it. Outside the pavilion is an elevator and a telephone booth—each its own kind of pavilion—and a sign that reads club. Some kind of orange light seeps through the glass door beneath the sign. Not quite copper—more artificial, fluorescent, like a light from a lottery machine.

Everywhere there are signs that do not read club, thinks the writer. What do they read? Well. Grid, glass, line, plane, leather, tile, light, bamboo, silence, plastic, precarity, violence, distance, austerity, desire, debt, metal, mineral, sex—for example.

What else?

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Quinn Latimer’s arresting writings find expression in literature and theory as well as contemporary art and its history. Moving from Southern California to central and southern Europe, crossing geographies and genres, her texts record specters and realities of culture, migration, and displacement, compounding the vagaries of rhetoric and poetics with those of personal history and criticism.

Composed in the space between the page and live performance, Latimer’s recent essays and poems collected here examine issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading, and art making. Shifting between written language and live address, between the needs of the internal and the external voice, Like a Woman retrieves the refrain, the litany, and the chorus, exploring their serial ecstasies and political possibilities.

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Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, and editor from California whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and image production. Her writings and readings have been featured widely, including at Chisenhale Gallery, London; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 13, Part II, in Beirut. Her books include Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder, coedited with Adam Szymczyk (Sternberg Press, 2014); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse Publishing, 2013); Film as a Form of Writing, with Akram Zaatari (WIELS/Motto Books, 2013); and Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012). Latimer is editor in chief of publications for documenta 14.

Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press, 2017)
Design by Sam de Groot
13.6 x 20.5 cm, 248 pages, 1 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-315-8
€20.00

Book on Sternberg
Interview with Quinn Latimer in Bookforum