Karla Kelsey Boeken

Focusing on feminist art-making, this book explores themes of identity and resistance through the perspectives of three narrators: an actress, a thinker, and a filmmaker. The actress grapples with her roles, questioning the authenticity of performance, while the thinker seeks her identity beyond being a muse. Central to their stories is the concept of evolution and growth, akin to a bird molting. The title symbolizes the delicate yet vital nature of art, emphasizing how protest can infuse meaning into creative expression.

Lyrical poems that tell the story of a nameless woman navigating a technological dystopia. In the poems of On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher's place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems. Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique, On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.