num_pages: 156
description: In a long delirious monologue driven by bile and cocaine a prostitute named Anncia recounts the story of her life remembering and sometimes inhabiting the men and women who left the deepest scars on her psycheher absent father her mentally disturbed mother the son she never wanted the parade of lovers like the poet and the philosopherall the while drawing grand conclusions about the nature of sex life and death from her own experiences. In a world ravaged by pollution and unceasing war the narrator's acid tongue condemns anyone who believes that filth and depravity have more to do with copulation than the misery inflicted by exploitation and inequality.In acidic relentless and sometimes dream-like prose Barbieri conjures a figure at once singularly human and divine an androgynous eternal being made of viscera and utterance. The Whore more than anything is an interrogation of interiority and the ways in which the emotional and spiritual interior is not only inseparable from ones physical form but in fact strengthened by acknowledgment of the body.
language: English
title: The Whore
publisher: Sublunary Editions