I Think About My Body Too Much

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.

Caitlin Lenz’s diaristic and archival film I Hate the Pool is a searing inditement of patriarchy’s pernicious gaze, impossible beauty standards, sexual harassment, and the agency in writing one’s own narrative. Through a deftly rendered soundscape and collage visuals that evoke Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s brilliant Schmeerguntz (1965), Lenz’s film expertly explores and subverts the violence we inflict on ourselves in response to misogyny which surrounds us at all times. Almost halfway through the film, Lenz cuts to shots of her dog, a nod to filmmakers like Carolee Schneemann whose cat, Kitch, appears in various scenes of Fuses (1964-67). While Schneemann also explored sexual violence, she also, like Lenz, looked for reprieve in animals and “the persistence of feelings.” I feel, watching Lenz’s work, the necessity of “personal clutter,” how mining one’s own lived experience for art is the most profound, and joyful, work.