A Review of 'An Image of My Name Enters America'

When Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie came out last year, I was inundated with essays that analyzed the film’s joys, flaws, and gender politics. They often did so using a popular formula: mix high culture and low—children’s toys with critical theory—to reveal the ideology behind a “cursed work,” one that is flawed, but glamorously so. Many of those essays, I’ll confess, didn’t sustain my attention. But I tore through the poet, art critic, and novelist Lucy Ives’s essay collection with glee—even though she deploys similar tactics and theorists. What makes her approach feel so novel, so fun?