Interlacing portraiture, collective biography, and cultural criticism, All the Women I Know celebrates the emancipatory power of refusal.
Christine Hume and Laura Larson’s unclassifiable dirge of grief and rage against patriarchal violence weaves together photographs, poetic language, and . . . the testimony of women going about their lives, interrupted and punctuated by violence and erasure. Together, these voices form a necessary chorus that is as powerful as it is timely. As image and text converse and collaborate . . . we all bear witness together.
—CRAFT EDITORS
All the Women I Know combines the power of photography and anaphoric incantation to offer a testimony of what it is like to be a woman in our current era. The photographs are portraits of the backs of heads, and lines beginning with “No woman I know . . .” arrive like tides along a shore. This work documents women’s silhouettes, how they hold themselves, each other, their fears, what they’ve witnessed, survived—pass on, and endure. There’s tremendous power in the anonymity of the “No woman”—she is every, any woman—each lyric is fact, secret, regret, the thing that happens all the time that should never happen and don’t we wish it didn’t happen. “No woman I know has already said it. They are saying it now.” I needed this book; I found myself in it; this book is for every woman you know, and the people who love them.
—DIANA KHOI NGUYEN, POET AND MULTIMEDIA ARTIST
Hume and Larson conjure a protective spell and musical, incantatory grappling with concepts of visibility, knowability and manifestation.
—STEPHANIE BARBER, WRITER AND FILM/VIDEO ARTIST
All the Women I Know is driven by a raging heartbeat that clears a feminist path through the social harms and betrayals we survive every day as women. The book’s creativity with language and imagery affirms, with boundless trust, our individual and collective abilities to change this treacherous world.
—CAROL JACOBSEN, ARTIST AND FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF MICHIGAN WOMEN’S JUSTICE & CLEMENCY PROJECT
Hume and Larson make poetry out of the collision of image and text offering a haunting provocation about our contemporary moment, our feminist futures, and what can happen when we resist.
—GEM FLETCHER, WRITER AND HOST OF THE MESSY TRUTH PODCAST
