MONSTER GIRL THEORY, 2019

"I rot at the touch and still, I throw myself / at anyone willing to look. Men grab at the soft / fruit of my body. I unskin myself into something / real. The only teeth left baring are my own."

​A poetry micro-chapbook, published by post ghost press on September 23rd, 2019.

Buy it here

Kanika Lawton's Monster (Girl) Theory is an ode to film theorist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, monster movies, and monstrous women. It is an uncanny howl in the night; it is the unsettling gaze of a woman raised back to life. How do femininity and monstrosity interact and bleed into one another? How are racialized bodies and feminine bodies drawn as terrible, terrifying, troubling? The theses of this small book are unsettling and transformative, aching and vicious; Lawton binds together film theory and lived experience into something wholly new and wholly fierce.