Locally Made Panties

Ricochet Editions, 2016. Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Hybrid Genre.

A transgenre (prose poem? flash nonfiction?) exploration of fashion, style, body image, consumerism, and other related ventures into the personal-political, LOCALLY MADE PANTIES is light-hearted, deadpan and deadly serious. After asking herself what she was truly most scared to admit in her writing—what was most taboo—Greenberg realized that, rather than sex or family history, what felt the most revealing and terrifying was to confess how much time she spent thinking about hairstyles and shoes. Stuff that, perhaps, a professor of poetry, a so-called intellectual and feminist, a person who cares about justice and activism, a busy working mother and wife, does not want to admit thinking about. So, in a series of book-length short first-person essays, Greenberg thinks about war, What Not to Wear, fat, conceptual art, lingerie, pregnancy, J. Crew, activism, breasts, street attention, vintage clothes, feminism, Project Runway and money, and the connections between it all.