Laura Henriksen. Laura’s Desires. New York: Nightboat Books, 2024. 151 pages.




Laura’s Desires hosts an abundance of Lauras, and their desires proliferate. The cast includes Laura Palmer, Laura Mulvey, Petrarch’s Laura, and the Laura from the “Laura’s Desires” movie poster in the lobby of the porn theater in the film “Variety” (1983). The Lauras—made synchronous (like how a dream flickers) by the echo of their name—are among the book’s prisms for the question of how wanting and needing create and destroy the world. “Variety” becomes a central thread: its plot and the story of its making are both tooled toward questions about the erotics of watching, the mundanity of writing, and the inevitable collapse between the poles of big ideas (autonomy and dependence, doubt and faith). “Everything that could happen does, in some possible world,” is the grief-laced epiphany that issues from one of the most poignant scenes in the book, after the night passage of a horseback rider is observed through a bedroom window on Fulton Street, following an untimely death. Henriksen devotedly studies how these appearances—symbols and other apparitions—are both flimsy and deep. Things that happen, when they register on film or in writing, are just held together by the formal qualities of the medium, and the long-poem quality of life.

The main character is not the Lauras, but the opportunity—and the publicness—of their subterranean drives. Laura’s Desires pursues a wanting gaze, fractured by promiscuity: to understand or feel something, to know or yield to not knowing. James Hillman distinguishes the logic of a “dayworld style of thinking”—marked by “literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps”—from the territory of dreams, through which “thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences” (13). This is a critical distinction that bears out through the language of Laura’s Desires. Henriksen’s desirer makes a Frankenstein vessel out of readings of texts from film to radio hits to Wittgenstein. Imagistic cascades, formal and philosophical observation, critical analysis, and lucid reports from one person’s experience of the city, nation, planet—produce a variegated artifact a reader can immerse in (ideally underground maybe, on the subway), and emerge from with resolutionless pleasure. All effort put toward knowing and saying has the same vital futility as fucking. “This lack of knowledge is no problem, presents no hindrance to living in or into the world I desire, but instead is the only way to get there, to already be there” (137). Henriksen recuperates futility—of acts of writing, or sex—inside a lineage of bewilderment.

Henriksen’s persona suggests her crisis of faith started with an adolescent sympathy that cropped up for Judas. Yes, it is sexy—and too relatable—that Jesus was betrayed this way: with a kiss. Henriksen thoroughly combs through the misery and (sexual) frustration intrinsic to writing: “Sometimes I wonder if I even like writing, it's so difficult, and so rarely do I say what I mean” (51). Yet there is an effulgence even in Henriksen's grammar. When a thought becomes more feverish or urgent, clauses extend toward an excess that is truly funny for how it reveals some desperation—to know something, to communicate, or finalize meaning—even as the lengthening sentence holds off the terminus, delaying gratification as it were.

“Dream Dream Dream”—the fragmentary first section—makes an instrument of the strange cycle between having, recalling, and describing a dream. The apparition of a full scene might leave behind only 2 or 3 descriptive sentences, and confusing ones, where the Lauras’ desires shift between them, or where pornographic imagery in a film is replaced by the thorough pornography of poetic description (where, as Henriksen observes in the case of “Variety”, it is unrecognized as such by the protagonist’s boyfriend, as well as the film’s critics). Henriksen observes the “anticommunal element of dreaming,” which is betrayed, or desired out of, through the act of writing. Language that reaches from the waking world to describe dreaming wants to function with dayworld logics: of exposition, clarity, even proportions between a symbol and its meaning. “Dream Dream Dream” voices out of night logic, offering manifold answers to proliferating questions. The questions being song lyrics, death, radio signals; the answers being ekphrastic back stories, owls, the report of one's arrival in another person's dream.

The second long poem, “Laura’s Desires” flows out in a continuous gush: a subtle concrete poem for how it mimics an analog film strip unhooked from its reels. Here Henriksen formally sutures sex to writing, and then tears them apart again and again. Both practices promise satisfaction, pleasure, or togetherness; both are shockingly mundane, they smell like sweat and time. “It is not possible to be at home in this world, and there's nowhere else to go. Is there any joy but in the ardent exercise of futility?” (55-56). The book is stacked with aphorisms like this one, which are true, like the essence of a dream may be true even while the plot is intrinsically lost, screen memories overlaying each other as in a No Wave film. Writing is as futile as dreams. Or in this exercise of making the most of what we have to work with: thick portfolios of fantasy, play of language, or touch. The text traces desires movement without landing. A destination would be too certain and uncurious.

In analyzing Nan Goldin’s work, Henriksen writes that her relationships were “not mediated by the camera but rather clarified through the image-making process, a distinction which threads the needle between the cascading images, personal and cultural, that make up Laura’s Desires (74-75). The writing approaches clarity that draws its logic from the chthonic prism of dreams and drives (death, desire). The blur manifests its own critical intelligence. The image-making process here—fueled by Laura’s desires—metabolizes the watched world into a good book.

Because of the title, I assumed or hoped a readerly voyeurism would be satisfied: that Henriksen would be thoroughly laid bare, exposed for desiring. And she is, in a way, using proper nouns, and private thoughts to examine the way desire emboldens and degrades the systems of power that rule our world. Great intimacy is sponsored by exposition of the titular possessive. The book is an autobiography, but of a psyche not a person. It takes an underworld approach to the terrain of the world: the rapture and violence of love and death, which pigments the utter mundanity of life.







Works Cited

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Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. Harper & Row, 1979.