Hilary Plum

"Ferocious, hilarious, slippery, and wise" (Leni Zumas)-a protest novel for our times. A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a "heartbeat law" criminalizes most abortions statewide. In the ensuing upheaval, her boss is arrested for providing illegal procedures and the clinic is shut down. Angela has never been either an activist or a model employee. But she gets why her boss didn't follow the rules. She decides to go on a hunger strike in the boarded-up clinic, to protest her boss's arrest and everything that's been lost. She'll draw on her skillset: the masochistic discipline of a runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary). Angela's protest is solitary, enraged, and a little messy, but it mobilizes a group of people around her-an ex who's a local journalist looking for a good story, the everyday people the clinic once served, and most especially a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine. Lucid, strange, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric to explore the relationship between bodily autonomy and real freedom. Angela's story is about what abortion access means day-to-day and how much we are-in ways that can transform us-responsible for one another.

Excisions investigates the feeling— the problem and the syntax— of being on a threshold. If you don’ t know what will happen next, you can’ t yet say what has happened. These poems arise from states of precise unknowing, desperate imagination, inchoate emotion, encounters with mortality and power when they’ re closing in but haven’ t caught you yet. What is choice, given the terms of an ill body, survival in a grotesque empire? Tenderly and acutely, these poems examine the life of before and after: when something is excised from you, it was you, and you are what remains.

Hole Studies is a book about care and the forms it may take. An essay collection on writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice, difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy, whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radical importance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and private modes: Hole Studies keeps listening. What is it we need from each other? What could we still make happen? This book looks for forms of responsiveness and moments that matter. It honors everyday acts of thinking and trying. Essays explore the music of the Swet Shop Boys, the literature of the US's brutal war in Iraq, the career of Sin ad O'Connor, the aesthetics of the Dirtbag Left, the legacies of the "war on terror," feminism on the job, and illness in America. Hole Studies is an intimate document and a critical guide. Hole Studies would like to work for you.

Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Hilary Plum's WATCHFIRES is an intimate account of public and private life during the long years of the war on terror. This remarkable essay begins in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and illuminates the relationships among cancer, autoimmune disease, the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, Occupy, veteran suicide, the American epidemic of gun violence, and Plum's family history. The result is an urgent inquiry--philosophical, political, and personal--into the maladies of our age. Hilary Plum's memoir WATCHFIRES is a tender, twisted, darkly vibrant meditation on the war on terror as autoimmune disease. A quiet work of genius, as hopeful in its punishing honesty as it is rueful in its dire beauty, WATCHFIRES warns, remembers, regrets, recovers. Plum can taste our febrile paranoia and writes it inside out.--Roy Scranton Hilary Plum's WATCHFIRES derives its title from the military practice of lighting a large fire after a battle, to help those lost to locate the group. How apt, given how lost we are. Composed of paragraph pyres, WATCHFIRES illuminates the illness of our bodies and our body politic. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and of the private illnesses that the author and her family have endured, WATCHFIRES poses poignant and essential questions about our age: where does the self begin and end? Who is the other if not my own (other-abled) body? Is terrorism a political act or a cancer? In the tradition of Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and William Stafford, Plum shores these half-fictive, all-true fragments against the ruins of our humanity, lost islands in the age of terrorism and autoimmunity.--Philip Metres Hilary Plum is a remarkably natural essayist and WATCHFIRES is teeming with wisdom, depth, and ache. Flitting among a half-dozen topics with organic ease and wonder, Plum's work is oblique but always precise, personal and utterly controlled--imagine what Virginia Woolf might have written if she'd been intimately familiar with the Boston Marathon bombing, having a partner suffering from cancer, and the forever wars. If there's any justice in the reading world, this book will be read broadly and passed between admirers for decades to come.--Daniel Torday

Hilary Plum’s grave and elegant novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on human suffering and the sorrowful challenges of men and women striving for collective change.A veteran of the US war in Iraq commits suicide, and his brother joins with four friends in search of ways to protest the war. Together they undertake a series of small-scale bombings until an explosion claims one of their own. This is an elegy for those two deaths and the war itself. In They Dragged Them Through the Streets Hilary Plum gives form to the anger and troubled idealism of the American home front’s experience of today’s wars. Moving freely in time among multiple narrators who are seldom named or clearly identified, They Dragged Them Through the Streets highlights the trauma of being unable to hold on to what matters in life, to find a way to alter or influence what cannot be controlled. Poverty, madness, despair, the deep bonds and boundaries of friendship, love, family, national politics, the national obsession with war, addiction, idealism, nostalgia, grief—these all have a place in Plum’s reckoning. This is an innovative work in the great tradition of war literature and a singular chronicle of one generation’s conflicts.