“My dear my dear you will at some point fall through the other side of the myth and there are several options.” If Girlness is dollness, and dollness is death, then, as Ferris stages in their glittering debut, girlness can be separated from the self, played with, admired, and set aside. For a book in which “to be” is to be recast, Anti-Heroines has a distinct and highly original point of view. Ferris makes no attempt to gather their fractured narratives, trusting the splintering to map its own story. The estrangement is genuinely disturbing; the wisdom hard won through playing. I’m awestruck by Anti-Heroines’ mutating constellations. Sophia Dahlin

Lo Ferris’s Anti-Heroines performs a miraculous weaving; a healing tapestry for all of us who have attempted and failed to contextualize ourselves within systems—academic, psychiatric, religious—that simply do not account for the brutality of the system itself. Part grimoire, part autotheory, Anti-Heroines is an “astral project” that traverses through time, trauma, and history—specifically that of violently erased artists such as Lucia Joyce. Ferris resurrects and reincorporates the political, intellectual, and emotional contributions of their anti-heroines through their own archival research and translations in an effort to quite actually give voice; to locate that which was lost in translation—or never translated at all. This is a book written to the moon, to the body, to the absolutely mystic power of “living long enough to write this down.” Candice Wuehle