Publisher: Ink Press Productions
Letterpress printing by Amanda McCormick
Designed and spray-painted by Tracy Dimond
BLURBS:
Something burns your skin. This could be nature. This could be the sun. This could be where you are in someone else's eyes. Boys will be boys, right? That's natural? That's your nature? Tracy Dimond's I WANT YOUR TAN questions these points of ignition, the point at which the body meets the world. The point at which a woman becomes her skin, becomes her dress, becomes consumed. She is not here to "romanticize ruin." She wages "war on authenticity." And you should be screaming her battle cry. - Caroline Crew
“I am approaching an age / where getting it together / is a war on authenticity.” Yes, that age has arrived & we’re all living in it. Today I am coping by buying into Tracy Dimond’s I Want Your Tan. These poems say that a body’s contortions&costumes&contacts don’t make an identity, but how we feel about those contortions&costumes&contacts do. It takes one statement to start a spiral, but this body is bombarded by statements (covetous/creepy/encroaching statements), the spiral changes direction, starts again, gets every/body wanting. Oh wanting wanting wanting. There are different kinds. I want you//I want to touch you//I want to be you//I want to wear you//I want you to be different//I want you to know me, my spirals. I Want Your Tan holds you accountable for knowing the difference. Oh Tracy oh Tracy how’d you get that tan? If you want it you’ll have to sit on Tracy’s porch under her sun & in the library under her lamp & swim in her pool & go back to the 90s & ride her bike. But coveting tans is creepy, go get your own fucking tan. Tip: ABSORB THIS BOOK. WAKE UP GLOWING & SPIRALING. - Meg Ronan
In I Want Your Tan Tracy Dimond is every therapist I’ve never had. “A costume is no attachment to identity,” she writes, and “it’s all fun and games until it’s time to go outside.” Dimond is speaking to the right now. The day, each (every) one of them, which our bodies must enter into. Dimond conjures the tan then exfoliates ‘til bleeding. I think: Tan: what’s painted or airbrushed or laid down for, but also what we earn for stepping out into the light/the sun. In order to be seen we must be touched by it, we must be damaged. “Do you know how to talk about / femininity divorced from fuckability?” Well, do you. “Do you confuse gender and / performance?” She uses the ultimate ‘natural’ way to change our appearance, the tan, to speak to the larger issues of living inside a world that both condemns and demands the “exotic.” Are we allowed to live in the world while owning a female body. Who wins, what sells. “Advertisements are art if I am your hobby.” So many times I wanted to jump up and shout YES while reading, but I’m in public, dressed up, and trying to be unseen. We are not alone but so very alone. We are told to be silent beauties, do not make a scene. Dimond defies, builds this space of everything she fears and hates and is and says look at me, listen to me. She yells, “I’m working hard! / Man-hours under the sun.” Nothing is ours. I mean, even tans fade. - Alexis Pope