She Is Raining: The Work and Life of Madeline Gins will be a biographical and critical study of the life and work of poet, philosopher, and speculative architect Madeline Gins (1941–2014). This book will trace Gins’s development as a poet and artist, first in the context of the New York City art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, and then through the course of her collaboration with the artist Shusaku Arakawa, to whom she was married. Calling greater attention to an artist primarily known for her partnership with her husband—as “Arakawa + Gins” and as a member of the Reversible Destiny Foundation, a design firm devoted to speculative architecture intended to prevent death—She Is Raining will describe Gins’s own radical, visionary practice as a poet and philosopher, locating in this body of work a series of accomplishments and realizations crucial to our understanding of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American culture and experimental writing.
Lucy Ives is the author of the novel Impossible Views of the World, published by Penguin Press in 2017 and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, the Baffler, frieze, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Vogue, among others. She was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a PhD in comparative literature from New York University. She currently teaches in the interdisciplinary Ithaca College image text MFA program and at New York University’s Center for Experimental Humanities. Ives’s second novel, Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, will be published by Soft Skull Press in 2019.