Maggie Carson Romano’s face was torn from lip to jaw in September. We know it was September because there is a painful photograph at the center of her exhibition Well, and the photograph is titled September 26. What’s pictured is the stretch of her body between her pink lips and her honey-colored collarbones, rudely interrupted by ragged Frankenstein stitches. We know that this was an injury to a woman considered beautiful. The artist was at the opening, standing in the middle of the room with her fresh scar.
I didn’t know what had happened. Later I found out that one part of the show is a (beautiful) prose poem that explains it all, but all 40 copies had already been taken that night, so I didn’t read it until later. As I walked through the show, instead, my body instinctively formed its own association, of how I tore during childbirth…
