Forbes Considers Pink Privacy

At Forbes, Brienne Walsh reviews Jessica Yatrofsky's book of two hundred short poems, Pink Privacy. The book, Walsh explains, "is a collection of short little poems about all of Yatrofsky's exes. In it, the feminine reigns supreme." Let's start there: 

“It was inspired by collective anger I had been harboring for a long time,” Yatrofsky said. “It’s a dirty diary, and it’s songs of lust. It’s somewhere in between, and it’s both at the same time.”

Yatrofsky is best known for her photography. She has published two monographs of photographs — I Heart Boy (2010) and I Heart Girl (2015) — and has directed films for the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier. But Pink Privacy contains none of her imagery. Instead, it opens with a drawing by Alphachanneling of a woman holding a man’s fingers inside of her. The rest of the book consists of a series of close to 200 short poems.

To be honest, Yatrofsky isn’t exactly Frank O’Hara or Anne Sexton in the sense that you can stop devouring her words. Her poems read like inside jokes that you can only access if you are close to her, and know all of the stories about her ex-boyfriends.

What’s more interesting than the book is Yatrofsky herself, who is beautiful, and when I met her, smelled of fancy perfume. Her lips were stained red. She was wearing leather pants. She told me that pink privacy, along with referring to vaginas, also refers to a room she keeps for herself in the apartment she shares with her boyfriend. He must ask permission to be let inside, she said. When she was gone for two months in Germany, he confessed that he spent a lot of time in pink privacy.

Read on at Forbes.