Rachel Rabbit White interview with Sophia Giovannitti for the Brooklyn Rail. Porn Carnival is Rachel’s first full-length book of poetry, an expansive meditation on both the exhaustion of selling erotic labor under capitalism, and the joyful possibilities of world-building outside of the confines of heteronormative society. She engages with the trap of proximity to money, when access to that money is precarious because it is predicated on a set of demands that quickly become unbearable. She dedicates the book, “To all the fellow sufferers.” Here's an excerpt: "Rail: What is being real vs. being fake? White: I don’t think there is any authenticity. You have to make your art from whatever you can, and when you have no time because you’re working all the time, then for me the answer is, “well, I’m going to live my life as my art.” I always see this quote on Instagram, this very overused Anaïs Nin quote, that’s something like, “I write to taste life twice.” [Laughs] Rail: Oh my god. White: People put it with a photo of a cappuccino or something, and I’m like, but I agree! I always had this distant thing in my mind: if I just write a novel about all of these experiences, then it will be done, and then I’ll be living a quiet little life where I’ll have to actually write real fiction, because I won’t have anything that I’ve lived to write about. But I’m also like, “bitch, you’ll never quit!” Antonio and I were talking about how the obsession with authenticity started with Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Kierkegaard, in his writing, was always about the mask, and taking off personas, which I love. And in Heidegger, there’s the question, can anything be authentic when we’re in this system that doesn’t allow for authenticity? But later, the obsession in America—it’s a pretty recent obsession—simply becomes a marketing ploy. Because marketing goes, no this is authentic, this isn’t authentic, it makes everyone immediately into a skeptic and a cynic. And I think that readers are skeptics and cynics too. Like their questions might be, is this truthful, did the writer really live this? Instead of, is this good art, or is this bad art? And so you asked before, is the poem a whore, which I love playing with, but I definitely think the poem is a hustler. Because the poem has to charm you and hustle you out of your skepticism!"