Carework

Issue #167 brings with it some exciting changes in the video essay and cinepoetry realm of TriQuarterly. As the year turns and the journal welcomes Jess Masi into the position of Managing Editor, Sarah Minor will step away from her role as video editor after six years of curating and writing about video works at the journal. Jon Bresland served as the inaugural editor of our now ten-year old video section, which boasts an archive of over a hundred carefully selected video works. Bresland was succeeded by Kristen Radtke, then Sarah Minor, and in 2025 writer and film critic Hannah Bonner will join the TQ team to take over curation of what is now the longest running video section at an American literary magazine. We look forward to seeing how Bonner shapes this section and invites readers and writers to the screen in years to come. In this issue we present works by Caitlin Lenz, Lee Hodge, and Josh Corson.

Lee Kathryn Hodge’s Carework is a video about the dark subtext of quotidian images, about all that domestic performance can visibly hide. Fittingly, Carework features red text on a black band, boldly underlining a quiet portrait in the style of Jenny Holzer’s ticker tapes. Yellow leaves fall into the babbling breath of the ticker as Hodge’s text undermines the unreadable faces of homes along a quiet street. Like the walls between the close-set houses, Hodge tells us, “Resistance and defiance come positively charged, but remain locked into the individual.” Hodge’s deceptively simple pairing of text and image delivers a sickly contrast that makes us look harder into the dark windows of each house. Behind their panes, particularly through screens like the one you may be looking through, we sense domestic laborers gritting their teeth further into the daily performance of unlabored consumption “in ever more intimate, personal ways.”