The Poem — Concerning Unknown Women

Caballero’s original poem is written in the voice of a professor of early modern literature encountering Concerning Unknown Women for the first time.

The bibliography is part of how she reads. A lifetime spent studying literature informs her encounter with the archival poems and imagined portraits.

Her navigation of the website is recorded as a video work. We see what she opens, where she pauses, what she returns to and what she leaves unread, while the poem voices her internal monologue.

As she reads the women in the archive, she begins to consider how she herself might be read through the records she leaves behind.

The screen recording makes the private performance of reading public, while the poem gives voice to what cannot be seen. How much can we know of another person, and how much of a self resides in the act of being read?

Reading a Website: A Choreography of Contemporary Readership, 2026

Thin Lines

It was my friend, the curator, who told me to come here, to this site.

You, she said, who make your living reading women, should visit this speculative,
feminist archive. I didn’t ask why her artworld insists on “speculative” when “fictional”
would suffice, didn’t point out how “archive” is derived from the Greek

root for “house,” for “rule.”

I’ve lost all thirst for dispute. It’s enough with my students—even the graduates
question my texts. Bibliography, I defend, is the nature of our beast. Also
its salvation—I think

but don’t speak.

Deliverance is private: can’t fathom flagging it like the nuns at my school
of the Sacred Heart. I was Catholic then, would attend mass with my dad.
He’d arrive late, skip the sermon but give alms, bench his knees,

implore thanks.

A divorcee, he couldn’t commune. He’d wait while I’d ingest the body in-
carnate of Christ. I don’t go anymore, though now I know that carnations
describe both divine birth and the tragic loss of the son.

Two birds, one throw.

Why do these portraits make me feel like a small girl and an old woman
at once? I want to flip a page and know more. Assign a class a list of books
to name the loss that marked each life. But of these women, scant records,

mostly machinations.

Would my picture reveal that I adhere to a god of my invention? I lift my hand
to my face. It, too, an archive—speculative sum of true parts. Twin eyes, paired
cheeks, thin nose, thin lines. Figure grown, imagined self, inside this room,

too much, of my own.

Listen to the poem:

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Thin Lines

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