Concomitance

Author: Monica McClure

Publisher: Counterpath Press (2016)

As with all failing systems, interdependence is a blessing and a curse. The accoutrements of a body and their associations with people, places, and time are inextricable from each other. Concomitants, if you will. Concomitance began as documentary and aimed to catalogue the infinitesimal yet burdensome acts of labor behind routine grooming, to examine the daily self reform implied by cosmetics and clothing. Because self maintenance eats up time, the book chews through memory with digressive narratives and swallows the present with real-time thought progressions. Dressing and the tedium of hygiene serve to put us more substantively in a time and place. I remember events by what I was wearing. I look at a tube of lip gloss and think of someone I wanted to kiss.