Catcalling -- the most avid activity of your typical heterosexual male. But him, with his stock of singular and eccentric aphorisms, is no match for Holly Melgard's literalisations. In this age of purely symbolic and frankly banal 'pussy grabs back', Catcall's claustrophobic babble instead narrativises the absurdity of feminine caregiving labour: "Hey pretty big little cute guy. Do you need to cuddle? Do you?" Here, Melgard stages the real comedy, illustrating how any man's sense of power exhausts itself in his very fantasy of what 'woman' might do for him -- by actually embodying it. And so, she smothers with a weaponised sympathy, burrowing neurotic pathways into your emasculation. Hey baby, there's no escape. C'mon baby, you know how much I care.

In Catcall, the pleasures of domestic language run wild, topsy turvy. Holly Melgard’s project brings me back to Fanny Howe’s writing on Pinnochio and the revolutionary play of mothers and children. At home, away from patriarchs and judges, Howe says, the imagination roams free. Except there are no mothers or children here, no puppets, and Melgard knows that you never really get away.

Catcall is great. Really. It’s a weird mix of tonal precision and conceptual ambiguity. Melgard’s rendering of speech is pitch-perfect, but she doesn’t reveal her procedure or intentions, leaving the book unframed. This makes the text—in which a relentless speaker insistently demands the affection of an unnamed interlocutor—more unsettling. It has something to do with the voice: as an intruder, as a weapon, as a form of intimacy. And it has something to do with careful listening and transcription. And it has something to do with repetition, harassment, and obsession. It’s creepy. And great.