[11/15/26] Smart, Willa: On Getting What I Want

Krupskaya Books, paperback

Publication Date: November 15, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Willa Smart says A body isn’t beautiful because of its skin but because it might be opened. Abjection stands on its head and abduction tops from the bottom. By tops, I mean speaks, or rather interprets, where spectacle can be measured with the tongue. Smart’s entrancing hanging paragraphs create a kind of negative space of water and light-filled air and the intriguing possibilities of opening holes. A hole is a multiplicand of wishes. –Robert Glück

On Getting What I Want is for lovers who know better. Think Plato’s Phaedrus but it’s Willa in a meadow with the sky and the plants and the stones all together hacking the tragedy of requited love into a new cosmology of sex and nonreciprocity. How much recognition can we really bear? These pages fuck, infect, suck, bleed, and think all at the same time. Smart gives us a queer method of hunger that knows the irrelevance of satiation. Read it like a textbook. –Rosie Stockton