Elevate Difference

Reviews by Elizabeth Brasher

Elizabeth Brasher

Elizabeth Brasher is currently completing her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry at New Mexico State University, where she teaches composition and creative writing and works as an associate editor for the literary journal, Puerto del Sol. Additionally, she is an assistant editor for Bone Bouquet, an online journal of women’s poetry. She holds an MA in literature and a BA in English, and lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico with her husband and daughter.

Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses

Let the whole world put on a pair of rubber gloves and plunder and pillage. We have no secrets any longer. We have become public property. Women who write about their lives face challenges that male writers do not. Not only are women charged with writing about their own lives, with creating selfhood on paper, they are somehow additionally responsible for upholding the idea of womanhood. In this way, they bear the responsibility for representing, and in a sense, for creating the lives of all women. (Considering the diversity of possible identities which women take on for themselves, this is at the very least, a difficult task.)

Remedies

“When you [lack] words to make others understand your truths, you [stand] apart from the jabbering masses. You alone [possess] proof of your unique and involuted humanness, and through that, contact with something divine.” Our ability to experience pain is what makes us human, but it is our inability to describe pain that brings us close to god. In moments of great crisis, religious rituals provide us with the right words to say.