Feb 28, 2025
Girl Work, Zefyr Lisowski
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Girl Work, Zefyr Lisowski
'I was perfect,' Nina whispers, and when she dies, it's like she's loved after all.
Zefyr Lisowski, from "Your Swan, My Swan"
Uncanny Valley Girls by Zefyr Lisowksi
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At twenty-seven, poet Zefyr Lisowski found herself in the place she feared a locked psych ward. While inside, she turned to horror movies—her deepest, most constant comfort. Rather than disturb, scary movies have always provided solace and connection for Lisowski, as they do many others—offering a vision of a world filled equally with beauty and pain, and a reason to reach out to others and hold them tight. After all, as Lisowski argues, what terrifies us most about these movies is our own uncanny reflection—and at the root of that fear, a desperate desire to love and be loved. In these wide-ranging essays, Lisowski weaves theory and memoir into nuanced critiques of films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Saint Maud. From fears about sickness and disability, to trans narratives and the predator/victim complex, to the struggle to live in a world that wants you dead, she explores horror’s reciprocal impact on our culture and—by extension—our lives. Through it all, Lisowski lays bare her own complex biography—spanning from a trans childhood in the South to the sweaty dancefloors of Brooklyn—and the family, friends, and lovers that have bloomed with her into the present. Deeply felt, blood-spattered, and brimming with care and wonder, Uncanny Valley Girls thrusts this seasoned poet to centerstage.
Because of its low budget, much of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was shot with natural lighting, which is part of what lends an eerie prettiness to the surroundings: their world, with its scrabble of brush and dust smeared everywhere and slowly setting sun, looks just like ours. A couple in their mid-twenties gently pushes the long amber grasses to the side to explore a neighbor’s house. House spiders weave webs, fibers shining in the afternoon light. At night things purple under dim moonlight, and in evening the film is heavy with sun, bright and sticky as a melting blood orange. Texas isn’t North Carolina, but at that moment I started to see both as not just ugly but gorgeous as well, decentering in their breadth. There, the trees and low shrubs have seen everything. There’s nothing that doesn’t promise to blossom, in one way or another, into an intimacy intractable in its depths. I entered the movie wanting to be scared because I dealt with my problems at the time by being scared. Otherwise, I’d feel too needy, too vulnerable and exposed. But that which entrances us and frightens us is so often the same.
Zefyr Lisowski, "I Loved 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' Before I Loved Myself," in Electric Lit, 2023
I have to believe that if we stare closely enough at what hates us, somehow we can make our own love as well.
Zefyr Lisowski, "The Girl, the Well, the Ring" from It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
We are in the woods. I am talking to you. Look at my dazzling eyes. Do you remember what you did.
Maybe in the better world, you are listening.
I threw my cell phone in the well.
Maybe there there’s no remembering at all.
— Zefyr Lisowski, from “AFTER I BECOME WELL, I THROW MYSELF INTO THE WELL HOLE,” published in Nat. Brut
literally blood box as a book is so. MAN MAN MAN like. i wear my skin on other skin & i am barely a daughter & it is all the same if i did it or if i didn’t! what makes something a box? is it the haunting? is it the rot? i wear their mother’s echo! i wear red on my hands, my porch, my neck! pears like blood & skin like blood & a knock on the door of the blood box! i dream of abandoning you. i dream of juice dripping down my chin & kindness & the violence of it. i am not trying to build sympathy but if i said it was an intruder would you hold me? it was. it was. oh god it was
Wolf Inventory, Zefyr Lisowski