Brutalities is a perfect book. Reading it felt like consuming something designed precisely for me and of course, I won't be alone in this–that is the genius of great works of art: they reach our deepest interiors by naming the unspoken ordinary, the things we fear seeing or being seen as. There is nothing ordinary about this book, however. It is a brainy, elegant, erotic, brutal, funny, hypnotic achievement by an author obsessed with the far reaches of what it means to live in a body, and how some kinds of love look like violence while others can be medicine. It has made a devotee of me; I'll read anything Margo Steines ever writes.–Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and Body Work
