Hole Studies

Hilary Plum (she/her) is the author of several books, most recently the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Her poetry collection, Excisions, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence. She was the recipient of the GLCA New Writers Award for the work of nonfiction Watchfires. She teaches fiction, nonfiction, and editing & publishing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program, and she serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. Recent work has appeared in Granta, College Literature, American Poetry Review, Fence, and elsewhere.

"If Montaigne returned today as a feminist and Sontag a poet, they might have together crafted an essay collection as astonishing as Hilary Plum's Hole Studies. Plum rigorously examines her many subjects (from a history journal's MLA citations to Sinéad O'Connor's infamous televised protest) and then rigorously interrogates her examinations. Each page holds more brilliance and artistry than should be possible. Hole Studies is an exciting read and a conceptual achievement, and Plum is one of the best American essayists around." - Jeanie Vanasco "Hilary Plum offers a vital interrogation of our very reason for being in this striking volume of essays. Her explorations range from the personal to the global, from the expansive traumas of war to the exponential reach of pop culture. Her reflections are often debilitating, yet she ultimately guides us toward the beginnings of forms, frameworks, and reasons for why we might want to keep moving forward in a destabilized world." - Andre Perry "When Sinéad O'Connor ripped up the pope on SNL, in 1992, I think I was more changed, more moved, as a human, woman, and artist, than I've ever been able to articulate even to myself. Courtney Love, in 2005, warned other women about Harvey Weinstein on TV, 12 years before it was at all ok to do so. Hole Studies is a space to watch and describe and repeat these kinds of utterances—these miracles—and to shine that unflinching, flexible, responsive and feeling kind of light (that light of dignified presence) into all these dustbins and hollows and holy hell holes full of maggots and molesters, colonizers, CEOs, all our bloated most belligerent ogres. Hilary Plum articulates to me what these real utterances have meant and I leave this book only thinking of the ways, one way, I might say something of value—off-script—before I'm dead." - Caren Beilin "I didn't realize how much, in this moment, I needed to read about literature as a space of radical hope until I was in the midst of Hole Studies. Literature, in Hilary Plum's brilliant, generous analysis, is at its most potent when it enacts language and form to create a space of sharing, care, and transformation, where the stakes are the stakes of how to be together in the world—which is to say, the stakes of love." - Sara Jaffe