There Must Be a Word
Alexis Clements, Luisa Heindle (Designer)
“In Los Angeles, a year after Taos, I’m sitting on top of someone different” (p.5). Written as an accompaniment to a film of the same title, this self-reflective prose piece follows the author during a writer's residency in Taos where she is making the film. With stills of time-stamped images of the film as centerpieces, Clements engages the reader in an inner dialog of sexuality and queer identity, while considering the impact and resonances of deep friendships. Guided by storytelling, shame, queer theory, sex workers, class, alchohol, and past relationships, Clements reconciles her own desires, sexual history, and a traumatic rape experience with the impetus to document her sexual journey, while instigating the boundlessness of sexual desire when in tension with differing geographic planes. She quotes Pat Califa, adrienne maree brown, Eliot Schrefer, Jules Gill-Peterson, Lauren Berlant, Nikki Giovanni, Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga, and other queer theorists, in addition to her nameless queer, non-binary, cis, and lesbian friends and exes, as she intimately shares musings on her travels, her body, and their looming stories. - Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz
Print Book, English, 2025
Alexis Clements, Greenfield, Mass., 2025