Amrou Al-Kadhi

Kiss My Genders celebrates more than 30 international artists whose work explores and challenges traditional gender categories. The book features works from the late 1960s through to the present, and focuses on artists who draw on their own experiences to create content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender. These include Lyle Ashton Harris, Sadie Benning, Nayland Blake, Jimmy DeSana, Chitra Ganesh, Peter Hujar, Juliana Huxtable, Zoe Leonard, Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry, Kent Monkman, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Christina Quarles and Del LaGrace Volcano, among many others. Working across mediums, many of these artists treat the body as a sculpture, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty and representations of the human form. From pop culture and gender dissidence to the embrace of the "monstrous" or "freaky," from the politics of pose to transfeminism and politics on the street, each of these artists throws light on a different way of seeing.

In Unicorn, the critic and historian Rosemary Hill collects together her published verse from 1963-1971, a period in which Carter began to explore the themes that dominated her later work: magic, the reworking of myths and their darker sides, and the overturning of literary and social conventions. With imagery at times startling in its violence and disconcerting in its presentation of sexuality, Unicorn provides compelling insight into the formation of a remarkable imagination. In the essay that accompanies the poems the critic and historian Rosemary Hill considers them in the context of Carter's other work and as an aspect of the 1960s, the decade which as Carter put it 'wasn't like they say in the movies'.