Woman Pissing (Paperback)

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Description


When we think of prototypical artists, we think of, say, Picasso, who made work quickly, easily, effervescently. On the contrary, in Woman Pissing, a literary collage that takes its title from a raunchy Picasso painting, Elizabeth Cooperman celebrates artists—particularly twentieth-century women artists—who have struggled with debilitating self-doubt and uncertainty. At the same time, Cooperman grapples with her own questions of creativity, womanhood, and motherhood, considering her decade-long struggle to finish writing her own book and realizing that she has failed to perform one of the most fundamental creative acts—bearing a child.

Woman Pissing is composed of roughly one hundred short prose “paintings” that converge around questions of creativity and fecundity. As the book unfolds it builds a larger metaphor about creativity, and the concerns of artistry and motherhood begin to entwine. The author comes to terms with self-doubt, inefficiency, frustration, and a nonlinear, circuitous process and proposes that these methods might be antidotes to the aggressive bravura and Picassian overconfidence of ego-driven art.

About the Author


Elizabeth Cooperman is coeditor (with David Shields) of the anthology Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter and coauthor (with Thomas Walton) of The Last Mosaic. Her work has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Seattle Review, 1913: A Journal of Forms, and other journals. She is the art director of PageBoy Magazine.

Praise For…


“This is a fiercely feminist book in the best sense, carving out a space for a female intelligence and decimating certain kinds of male productivity/surety. Cooperman has found her own form and managed to create a remarkable book—howlingly sad, oddly joyous, and persuasively devoted to a wayward/outsider/termite definition of art.”—David Shields

“An engaging and distinctive read, Woman Pissing challenges, provokes, and inspires. . . . Woman Pissing refuses to give way to conventional narrative, charts its own path, and evidences the instinctual effort and devotion of a writer keenly aware of just how thin the membrane between art and life can truly be.”—Jericho Parms, author of Lost Wax

“A book about the effort to write it, Woman Pissing is a living thing. Cooperman makes art of the effort to make art and manages, in that process, to make art—of art itself. The product is not final but a record of the process—pure pleasure for the reader.”—Kary Wayson, author of The Slip
Product Details
ISBN: 9781496231444
ISBN-10: 1496231449
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: September 1st, 2022
Pages: 192
Language: English