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Intuitively and practically speaking, This Is Almost That is, in effect, a handbook. It, by presenting female art history, shows us how to be an artist. Each career here, whether its arc is short or long, presents a new kind of way.–Eileen Miles “Poetry Foundation ” The title of this surprising collection of image/text works by twenty-five female visual artists and writers is a phrase borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. As Lisa Pearson writes in her afterword, It Is Almost That describes “the humming state of the not-quite this and not quite that,” namely, “what familiar taxonomies cannot order.” Hak Kyung Cha’s piece-composed of faltering phrases projected on black-and-white slides-points to the provisional nature of language and speech. While Pearson’s penchant for this open, indeterminate state might seem at first to evoke categories like ecriture feminine, twentieth-century Language-school poetry, or non-diegetic experimental filmmaking, her selections, works produced over a span of seventy-one years from Charlotte Salomon’s 1940 visual novel Life? Or Theater? A Song Play to Bhanu & Rohini Kapil’s 2011 India Notebooks, defy easy classification. Chris Kraus – –Chris Kraus “Bookforum “