Takes on Casual Takes

“What is Jessica O'Brien's Casual Takes? Is it simply ephemeral sprawl? Or does it reveal the vulnerability of the notes app as a space of outsourced memory; the wonderful strangeness of digital displacement as an enabling mode of reality-as-fantasy? Perhaps it embodies the progression of language that happens so clownishly when we let our hindbrain take hold. There’s so much we learn in this book that evokes outside of the frame—timestamps, the wifi network name, O'Brien's phone battery habits. So much of interior life these days is conducted digitally and yet these pages still hold the phantom touch of the physical body, fingerprints on a cracked phone screen, a kind of confessional truth."

-Trisha Low, Author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books, 2019).