first, happy birthday to the fine line! i dropped this hybrid chapbook with kith books on halloween last year. for those of you that don’t know, halloween is a big traumaversary for me, and it felt fitting to reclaim that day for this project.
i took the polaroids for this project at the beginning of undergrad. at the time, i was exploring porn and manufactured vs. genuine pleasure. i had always planned to do more with the series, but put it away and never returned to it. at the beginning of grad school, i started making erasures of the novels i grew up reading (Gossip Girl, The Clique, The Princess Diaries, to name a few). it became easy to go sexy with them, for some reason—maybe a teen novel is just written to sound as juicy and salacious as a sixteen-year-old can imagine. but the erasures quickly became a portrayal of my own early sexual experiences, which toed a fine line between kink and abuse.
praise
using intimate portraits of the self and familiar language of others, nat raum’s ‘the fine line’ masterfully interrogates the perceived dichotomy between ecstasy and pain. is this person crying or laughing? is this phrase an invitation or a command? raum rejects the mutual exclusivity assumed in those questions and instead obsessively pulls you in to the grey area.
—sal kang, founding editor of Heartburn Review
press
the fine line can be purchased from kith books in print and digital formats.