Drink Deeply and Dream by Elspeth Walker





Published last year by Killer Dentist Press, Drink Deeply and Dream by Elspeth Walker is a short book filled with “liquid language” about the urge to drink her lover’s blood in order to heal the psychic wounds inflicted by capitalism and its privatization of stress.
In the work she writes:
"The first time I pierced him with a needle we were very nervous. When I listen back to the recordings, my voice irritates me, like I am talking to a child, like he might break if I fuck it up. We took it very slowly because we’d learned everything we knew from a nurse called Erin Sherer who had posted a rash of live phlebotomy tutorials to YouTube in a generous effort to help other nurses study for their exams."
Chronicling a period during which she believed that turning into a vampire might be her solution to the problems of late-stage capitalism, Walker admits to watching YouTube tutorials on how to draw blood and perusing vampire forums on the internet. Yet Drink Deeply and Dream goes beyond the illusion of wanting to become a vampire or deepening one’s romance; it functions as text-turned-art. Walker’s confessional writing allows readers to intimately analyze her identity and psychic drives in a way that dissolves the hierarchy between spectator and author.
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Elspeth Walker is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Extending from a broad interdisciplinary practice rooted in DIY video and performance, She often displays her own work within the context of collaborative, authorless presentations and experimental exhibitions. She was one-third of Evening Hours through the program's end in February 2020, and remains a regular contributing editor at Refigural magazine.
To read more of Drink Deeply and Dream, see Killer Dentist Press. For more on Elspeth Walker, see @ekwws