Olivia Muenz - Healthcare, The Systems That Kill Us, and Vibing Straight Through

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Machines, bureaucracy, health care, and the systems that kill us / TENS units / illness / Taoism, Buddhism, and the future / 5 year plans as antithetical to the human experience getting in the way of getting a job / the internet as primary third space / Tik Tok as creative platform / art as a way of being, process / everything we do is a form of art / dreams as involuntary vulnerability / Jung / dreamscapes / disability and sensuality, eroticism and illness / leaning into innuendo / hate noise / discerning what your desire is / the body articulating a desire which cannot be met / Sarah Manguso / Amy Hempel / there she is [the moon] / vibing straight through / birth readings / being blanketed by the night

https://www.oliviamuenz.com/

Olivia Muenz is a disabled writer from New York. She is the author of poetry collection I Feel Fine (Switchback Books, 2023), which won the 2022 Gatewood Prize, and chapbook Where Was I Again (Essay Press, 2022). She received a BA from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University where she won the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Conduit, Black Warrior Review, Pleaides, Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere, including being listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2023. Her writing has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Zoeglossia. She lives in the Hudson Valley.