We the Parasites 
by A.V. Marraccini
Sublunary Editions. 148 pages, $19.98
In We the Parasites, critic, art historian, and a finalist for this year’s Judy Grahn Award, A.V. Marraccini draws upon observations of insect and other parasitic life forms to examine her relationship to art—and in the process, examining her relationship with vitality, queerness, and erotics.
Marraccini forages through the canons—Greek texts and artifacts— and the art of the painter Cy Twombley and his Iliam series, and writers Genet, Rilke, Eliot, and the particularly problematic Updike, among others. Describing what she feels while writing about others’ accomplishments (and failings), she harbors major and minor obsessions, at times fuguing into synesthesia, at others stumbling into heartbreak. She draws compelling parallels between queer sexuality and various qualities of parasites, among them their mutualism, reproductive strategies, and gender paradigms.
Marraccini throws her own body in for appraisal: “I’m not even a good parasite because novelists or painters see me seeing them…” That this inquiry occurs during the last viral pandemic presses the vulnerabilities of her body, our bodies, and the social body. Furrowed into the text, reproducing, and taking over vital functions is a memoir of the critic, personal excavations of body and mind, host and creature—a genre-as-parasite. I suspect embedded in the text is also with a meta-critique of the digital age yet to fully emerge: “Actually there isn’t much noise in the world now, just buffering, buffering as we’re all trapped inside the Internet. Everything’s a signal.”
“To be a critic and to be queer both are exercises in denial, in misplaced longing…” Marraccini supports this sorrowful claim without veering into diary-of-a-sad-girl because as often as she is torn up over a lover, a text, or Nike of Samothrace (winged, like Lucilia bufonivora, the toadfly, and headless, like the infected toad), she is as often ecstatic about what she is seeing, reading, and feeling. We the Parasites is a deeply personal and ekphrastic poem-as-essay. It pursues its end to contaminate criticism with the queerest of methods. Dig in.
Dale Corvino’s essays have appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. Bonds & Boundaries, his debut short story collection, was published in 2023 by Rebel Satori Press. His memoir of sex work, Afterlife of a Kept Boy, won the C&R Press Nonfiction Prize and is scheduled for publication in March 2025.
