- Olivia Brooks
- Jun 30
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 5
CHASING TRACES: A Review of Elizabeth Cooperman’s Woman Pissing
by Sydney Wills
Woman Pissing is a delightful paper trail, a gleam into the art of micro-essay consisting of slightly under 100 short chapters that grapple with their own processes of production. The premise of the book, which is identified in its own preface as “flawed,” is to document the narrator’s various attempts to begin her novel: the catastrophe of commencement. As Cooperman struggles with the material confines of a “book,” thrashing against the idea of “beginning,” “middle,” and “end,” readers see how this temporal prison manifests into her real life and opens up a larger examination of aging, productivity, and childbirth. The result is a compelling form that ditches “traditional” narrative in order to provide readers with the bits left behind during the writer’s pursuit of it. The essay collection’s unique structure is the torque that all else revolves around as the aging narrator grapples with the inevitable existential torment accompanying an important yet floundering creative project. Woman Pissing’s bits-and-pieces approach to providing insight on these topics provides a form that emphasizes craft, particularly craft as a circular and perpetual process.
“The flawed premise of this book humiliates me as much as the flawed execution. I tried starting with God, Picasso, my mother, springtime, etc., and nothing jelled. With each new beginning, the project collapsed in another way” (ix).
Woman Pissing consists largely of observation and reflection laid out in each brief chapter so that they appear to be staggering across the narrative. Yet, it is just this spluttering quality that brings so much charm to the pages. Each faltered start contains within it small kernels of wisdom regarding the artistic process, the act of managing creation, and the need for feminine intellect in the dominant narrative. As the anecdotes of others slowly take precedence over the narrator’s, these kernels of wisdom become increasingly punctured with references to the biography of renowned writers and visual artists. Some of these cameos linger and become overarching frames within the narrative, adopting an almost character-like quality, such as Lee Krasner and Katherine Mansfield. Others, such as the ballet choreographer George Balanchine, are injected omnisciently into the narrative only momentarily.
In framing her personal observations regarding fecundity within the artistic lives and processes of these great figures, readers simultaneously get a feel for the pressure that the narrator feels to create, as well as the personal importance of this intellectual (and notably feminine) pool of reference that she draws from. Although it might occasionally feel like someone desperately clinging onto her influences at the expense of her own intellectual freedom, it is clear that these female figures and colossal feminine sculptures serve a larger purpose for the book’s development. The awareness of this massive and feminine literary world is a grounding source for the narrator as she simultaneously embeds this multitude of voices into her own world and draws inspiration from their autonomy. Just as much as the narrator is horrified comparing her progress to theirs, she celebrates their work and the self-doubt that was overcome to produce it.
“In a perverse way, I enjoy my role in this ill-fated mission, the illusion of being useful. Instead of scraping away, we just seem to paint and paint and paint” (28).
Although this collection of false starts is steeped in the reverent reflection of artistic tradition, there are substantial moments of anecdote that work to push the plot forth to satisfaction. Readers receive a cast of characters that, although only fleetingly functional, are portrayed as vibrantly complex. There is mention of the narrator’s mother, though mostly as a gendered point of anxious comparison between her mother’s accomplishments at her age, in childhearing and otherwise, and her own. There is “The Artist,” a critical intellectual figure whose artistic confidence and slew of literary recommendations serve as a foil for our narrator’s stagnancy, as well as a source of complication for her process. Additionally, “The Old Blind Man” accompanies the narrator on her journey towards production with a detached encouragement and dry pragmatism that provide a necessary grounding for the narrator’s interiority.
“I like a line of poetry as ornamented as a bride. The Artist likes a minimal line, a bone gnawed clean by one of Baudelaire’s dogs” (13).
It could be said that these capsules of prose unfold into a larger exploration of production in all its forms, but it may be more accurate to describe the capsules as folding into themselves as the narrator confronts the ambiguities of these ideas. Every moment of grounded description or narrative momentum is accompanied by a bite-sized poetic image, an abstraction for the narrator to retreat within. A worry about how to end the book might manifest first as a real-life situation and then as a surreal twentieth century painting, not stopping until it’s as abstracted as an ancient figurine with indecipherable markings. But this retreat into ambiguity is anything but unsatisfying.
In Cooperman’s own words, she, “...tried starting with God, Picasso, my mother, springtime, etc., and nothing jelled.” So it comes as no surprise that contending with such magnitude of theme and image would result in a work that, itself, feels large and ambiguous, despite the bite-sized quality of its chapters. It is precisely this shifty, playful approach that allows readers to enjoy following the paper trail: we “make do” alongside her and find our place in the flexibility of the collage, the presently unknown narrative.
SYDNEY WILLS is a teacher, writer, and MA student pursuing a degree in Literature and cultural studies. Her research interests revolve mostly around film and media theory, particularly ethnography and subversions of the American road film genre. She currently lives in swampy Florida, where she runs the magazine and works as a DJ for her local college radio station. When she has the time, Sydney writes poetry and music journalism that has been published with organizations such as Shufflequest and Ears to Feed.
ELIZABETH COOPERMAN's work has appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle, Seattle Review, and 1913: A Journal of Forms. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington in 2010, lives in Seattle, and works for Poetry Northwest and a ninety-year-old blind man.