To Be Human
Is To Be A Conversation

Etymology traces slight changes in pronunciation of a word over time. These are not inundations. Their travel marks an erosion, as in saliva wearing the basin of the mouth away. A single river is never the same river, a word never the same, having traveled as water over the lungs.

Andrea Rexilius's first book, TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION, combines memoir, essay, performance, research, poetry, and lyric meditation to entwine, twist, and twin the physical and spiritual consequences of sisterhood. Through a series of investigations and experiments, the text transforms initial factual fragments into the bodily material of the (heard and unheard) language of intimates. "Our crime is she began to grow in my skin," writes Rexilius, "A con artist. A mammal. A flower at the back of my skull."