![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/images-10.jpeg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\tIn Foam,<\/em> Zambreno has further figured out how to express love for art amidst the often-stifling pressures of daily life as a perpetual adjunct, parent, and renter with no financial safety net. They neither flatten the complicated, messy experience of living in precarity nor diminish the promise and possibility that keeps them writing. Such balance\u2014between struggle and hope\u2014is hard to strike effectively (and honestly), in large part because the intersecting worlds of art, literature, and academia contain an extreme kind of class striation that coexists with so many shades of privilege and power. Though Zambreno\u2019s narrator is too inside these conditions, too implicated, to offer outside analysis, they make the textures of these striations and imbalances felt.<\/p>\n \n\tReviews of Zambreno\u2019s writing since 2012\u2014when their third book, Heroines<\/em> (2012), provoked love-hate reactions\u2014are a wild ride, wilder than you\u2019d expect for a writer who is so searching and process-oriented (and primarily platformed by small presses). Foam<\/em> is Zambreno\u2019s 13th book (if you count the 2013 chapbook), a quantity often commented upon in and out of their writing. \u201cPinprick feelings of resentment\u201d come between Foam<\/em>\u2019s narrator and a student-turned-friend because \u201cI have published so many books.\u201d The \u201cscenes of creative blockage\u201d in Zambreno\u2019s books \u201ccan feel disingenuous,\u201d observed a New Yorker<\/em> profile, \u201cfor Zambreno is conspicuously prolific.\u201d Zambreno\u2019s refusal to claim a genre is a point of contention, too; the author fails \u201cto discern between a memoir and a novel narrated by a fictional character,\u201d according to a 2012 Bookforum<\/em> review. They express \u201cself-doubt, inaction, excuses\u201d in a way that makes \u201cthe stakes\u201d seem \u201cfar higher for the writer\u201d than \u201cfor the reader,\u201d complained a different Bookforum<\/em> critic in 2020.<\/p>\n \n\tEven celebratory critics find faults that seem derived from expectations of formal conventions. In The New York Times,<\/em> Catherine Lacey, an experimenter herself, faulted Drifts,<\/em> in which the narrator tries to write a book called Drifts<\/em> and then has a baby, for one thing: \u201cThe structure of the narrative suggests that childbirth is the answer to every question she\u2019s been asking, a necessary redemption from her existential woes.\u201d I reread the novel\u2019s final section twice, trying to see what Lacey saw. Perhaps Lacey simply saw a culminating event at the end of a book that should have no culmination, and equated maternal affection with resolution. I saw a writer who, while besotted enough with the baby, was just trying to get through the pain and back to her desk.<\/p>\n Foam<\/em> opens in the hospital, where the narrator has just given birth to a second child, along with a placenta that looks like a \u201ccollapsed apartment building.\u201d Writing about this second postpartum experience keeps bringing the narrator back to the first, and to the apartment the family will have to leave (after lead poisoning, a rent strike, legal action). The narrator does not take any maternity leave after either child, and after the first, they instead\u2014in a desperate financial calculation that barely adds up\u2014hire a \u201cmother\u2019s helper,\u201d their former student who can ideally assist with childcare, domestic labor, and writing work.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s the latter task that attracts this young person, an aspiring writer named Eva. Eva and the narrator strain against their dynamic. Eva is given endless flexibility because she is paid so little, yet still more than the narrator and their husband can afford. The narrator has power, as the employer, as the teacher, and as the published writer, but Eva has (the narrator guesses) parents who support her, pay for her apartment, give her the freedom to insist she needs time off to write. When the first Eva cuts back her hours, the narrator hires a second Eva. The Evas begin proliferating across the book well before Eva Hesse (introduced to the narrator by the first Eva-employee) enters. The Evas could feel like a gimmick and yet they don\u2019t, because no forced connection is made between these women. After Hesse is introduced as a potential subject, additional Evas keep coming (a brilliant student, dead by suicide, who was ambivalent about the narrator\u2019s writing, \u201cthe melancholy of [their] characters, their whiteness and heterosexuality\u201d; a disruptive student whose behavior puts the narrator at odds with an unsupportive university administration; a dismissive cardiologist). Together they feel like evidence of the narrator\u2019s stretched-thin existence, their inability to do much more than enumerate, and the way their privilege coexists with powerlessness.<\/p>\n \n\tFoam, likewise, begins to make appearances before it is named as a throughline. There are foam shoes and fake flowers in a foam block at the hospital; expanding, yellowing spray foam filling the holes in the wall that the landlord will not properly repair. Then foam becomes a potential alternative to form, a name for \u201cthese desires toward softness\u201d that the narrator feels, \u201clike Eva Hesse\u2019s desire for form and non-form\u201d (here the narrator extrapolates from the artist\u2019s 1970 interview with Cindy Nemser). Foam<\/em> conjures the fragile sturdiness that characterizes both Hesse\u2019s sculpture and Zambreno\u2019s own vacillation between precarity and privilege.Foam is, in Zambreno\u2019s words, \u201cnervous systems and hostilities\u201d; it is texture, it is\u2014as philosopher Peter Sloterdijk writes in the book\u2019s epigraph\u2014\u201calmost nothing, yet not nothing.\u201d Foam is a model, perhaps, for how to write outside a predetermined shape, and how to squeeze creative work through the gaps left between contract labor (i.e., adjuncting) and domestic duties, yet make it wondrously expansive all the same.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/eva-hesse-kate-zambreno-foam-1234797035\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/img-90529b62-0efe-4ada-8fa3-895313ca4694.png?w=800″] \u201cI\u2019m writing a novella about Eva Hesse, I say when people ask,\u201d writes Kate Zambreno in their new book Foam, out from Semiotext(e) on September 15. But Hesse, the late sculptor who believed \u201cart and life are inseparable,\u201d keeps slipping away, getting subsumed or pushed out of Zambreno\u2019s reach. Just one quick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2128904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2128904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2128904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2128904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2128904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2128904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2128904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Installation](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/HESSE122112-hires.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>