i have to warn you, my love. the men will try to convince you that we stole the poetry from them. [...] "give it back!" they'll shout at us until their throats start to bleed. they mean give back the dead men who thought they were taking poetry with them to the grave. [...] the irony? it was our men who demanded we go outside to tend to their sunflowers, never dreaming of the possibility that we would wander away into their cemeteries.

Even without looking at the copyright, I could have accurately predicted that 'the witch doesn't burn in this one' was published sometime around 2016/2017. This collection of poetry is very much an object that exists as a time capsule of #MeToo-era feminism. It tries to be intersectional, but is ultimately too personally tied to its author to lift its head out of her navel despite trying to present a sort of universal womanhood.

That's not to say that it's a flop, however. There's nothing wrong with an artist creating something deeply personal -- indeed, that's where a lot of great art stems from. However, though clearly a reflection of her anger and sorrow at the ways women in America have always been let down by the patriarchal system they're born into, Amanda Lovelace fails in 'the witch doesn't burn' to move beyond those emotions. She hammers the notion that women are like fire, contain fire, can swallow fire, can survive all these things, but it rings untrue when the concrete examples she cites are about victimhood.

And there's nothing wrong with writing about that. Actually, I'd argue that her engagement with victimhood is far more interesting and nuanced (especially for that time) than almost any of the other topics she attempts to grapple with. It was pretty new at that time to push back against victim blaming by pointing out that the only people who have the power to prevent rape are people who rape. She talks about how by presenting rapists in media as primarily being villains hiding in the shadows rather than people you know is actually dangerous and is a big reason why victims don't come forward or why, if they do, they are often unsupported by their families.

She goes back and forth between speaking to men, speaking to women, and speaking to herself as a sort of avatar for 'the universal woman you' in this collection.

When she speaks to men, she's very angry. And that does contextually make sense. One piece, 'expectations vs. reality', unpacks why it can be so frustrating to talk to men about rape culture:

But the fact that she does so often speak to men despite this book being dedicated to and, I assume, marketed towards women makes pieces like 'expectations vs. reality' feel like shadowboxing.

And then there's the witch metaphor and the matches and the fire imagery.

Ok, this may be just my personal feeling, but I was really over hearing about women breathing fire/eating fire/being fire by the end of this. Maybe someone would find it empowering, but it just struck me as patronizing and it got old really quickly.

I'm also not completely sure I could tell you what the overarching theme of this collection was supposed to be other than broadly 'the #MeToo Movement and Hillary Clinton's failed presidential bid left me feeling really pissed off and sad and I just want to get those emotions out onto paper.' It feels unedited somewhat, it feels ironically very reactionary. Not reactionary as in right-wing, but reactionary as in, this feels like it's coming from an emotional, unprocessed place that can lead to bad logic and unintended contradictions. It feels like a starting point, not an end product. She talks about eating disorders, body dysmorphia, rape culture, domestic violence, the erasure of women’s accomplishments throughout history. But they're all fairly disjointed, and it's not always clear why given pieces were put in the order that they were. Nevertheless, this is presented and put together as though it is one complete piece of art, not a collection of unconnected poems.

Even the stylistic choices she made in a good number of the pieces feels unintentional. How she constructed many of them on the page doesn't feel like an artistic choice that was thought over with each word carefully put in its proper place (at least, that's how it felt), but more so 'I need to get this down, and this is how poetry should look on the page.'

That wasn't true for everything, and there were plenty where I could glean the artistic choices behind how she chose to construct a given piece, but they still often felt derivative. And when they weren't derivative, they seemed only half-baked (the poem 'there's plenty of room for all of us' has this line: "those pushed so far into the margin of the paper they're dangling off the edge". In it, the word 'dangling' is actually written vertically so that it 'dangles' in the middle of the page. But wouldn't it have been cooler and more illustrative to have it actually dangling off the margin at the edge?)

I would never fault someone for having a messy first draft, especially of a project they were clearly so vested in, but very much like Jeanette McCurdy's memoir 'I'm Glad My Mom Died', what is being presented as a finished product suffers from not being allowed to simmer longer on the stove so to speak.

As a matter of fact, 'Barbie' (2023) feels like the fully baked version of 'the witch doesn't burn in this one' (with arguably similar white feminism flaws as a matter of fact) and I wonder very much what Amanda Lovelace thinks of it.

The top tier version of these themes, though, is probably 'My Dark Vanessa' by Kate Elizabeth Russell (again, with the 'white feminism' caveat to an extent, but less than 'Barbie' and far, far less than 'the witch doesn't burn').

It'll be curious to see how the evolution of contemporary feminist art continues to evolve as we continue to march through the 2020s.

Also, also, a good place to branch into a more intersectional version of all of those aforementioned works would be pretty much anything Roxane Gay has been involved in, but perhaps particularly, 'Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture'.