Slaughterhouse Island, Jill Christman’s account of a college predator, is breathtaking in both its assertion and description. Melnick’s piece, called The Luckiest Milf in Brooklyn, also hits the nail on the head with the observation that “it’s a pretty sorry situation when the choice is either objectification by intimidating strangers or invisibility”. “I wanna fuck your asshole,” someone shouts to her on the street, before she adds in parentheses: “I was wearing a down coat.” Melnick, who is 42, is also strong on what Amy Schumer’s infamous sketch with Patricia Arquette, Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus calls society’s judgment on women’s apparent “last fuckable day”. That last contribution, by the poet Lynn Melnick, is one of the book’s best, at once awful and funny. There is the graphic street-heckling a mother faces with her four-year-old present and an indifferent policeman. There are the college rapes among the litter of red Solo cups and laughing frat boys, which bring to mind Christine Blasey-Ford’s recent testimony. There is trans representation and the intersection also of mental illness and the effect of sexual violence, in which some women try to cut the pain from their bodies. There is a male voice (Brandon Taylor writes about his rape by an aunt’s husband).
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