Four short and sharp looks at the social pressures weighing on young women are both witty and unsettling
Selima Hill's new collection The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism has an intriguing, faintly sexual title, disarmed, or complicated, by the jacket picture a handsome, striped Devon Rex cat with a pure, reproachful-seeming gaze. Unexpected visual juxtapositions occur throughout Hill's work, leading some commentators to associate it with surrealism. But the dislocations have a humane purpose: Hill may be anarchic but she is an anarchic reformer. Her small, glass-sharp poems mirror the reductive or disfiguring roles societies force individuals and animals to play.
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