Dear Readers,

For Triangle House’s first themed issue, we were inspired by Lisa Taddeo’s work of narrative non-fiction Three Women to collect writing about desire. We’ve been calling it “The Desire Issue” for the better part of a year, and that title kind of stuck. As the writers and artists who appear in The Desire Issue began to coalesce, we began to feel we’d amassed dextrous voices to represent desire and the way it digs into our lives.

We have an essay by Trisha Low, criticism about Three Women, a roundtable about desire with Genevieve Hudson, Kimberly King Parsons, T Kira Madden, and Chelsea Bieker, an excerpt of a play by Precious Okoymon, and poetry by Charlotte Shane, and we have the art direction of Andy Bess and Rachel Rabbit White.

On an aesthetic for desire:

art is easy... desire is natural... pink is a dream... beauty can be edited... create your own world...

:) hehe

Of course there is no complete view of desire, though.

Here’s some art that we actively ruminated as we put together this issue, and we think it’s important to build on what all these voices are giving us about the mystery of desire:

Elena Ferrante - The Neopolitan Novels, Days of Abandonment

Chelsea Hodson - Pity the Animal

Dirty Dancing

Hustlers

Anonymous - The Incest Diaries

Tidal - Fiona Apple

Invasion of Privacy - Cardi B

The Handmaiden

Larissa Pham - Fantasian

Adrien Brody - Marie Calloway

The Idiot - Elif Batuman

Excavation - Wendy C. Ortiz

Sylvia Plath’s poetry

Artemisia Gentleschi - Judith Beheading Holofernes and Artemesia by Anna Banti

We don’t believe the conversation about women and desire is even close to finished.

Love,

The Editors