Superstition
The Beach
Ali Shapiro‘s comics, poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Gertrude, Popula, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, among others. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, and now teaches writing at the Stamps School of Art & Design.
On Pleasure: “The source texts for these erasures come from the discourse surrounding comparative psychology and radical behaviorism in the 1950s, at the height of the American cultural obsession with the power of punishments and rewards to condition behavior. This discourse, while dated, contains some of my favorite tensions: between pain and pleasure, thinking and feeling, human and animal, instinct and control. By erasing these texts, I wanted to excavate their softer, sexier side—to reveal the messy humanity still lurking beneath the ‘hard science’ that claims to simplify our deepest drives and desires.”