The Spanish Fly Case presents itself as the surviving record of a trial that never officially concluded—a conceptual indictment in which misogyny was placed in the dock. Framed as a jury summons, the work compels the reader to take their seat, warning of graphic depictions of sexual violence, trafficking, historical and modern slavery, child loss, castration, plague imagery, and systemic failures of justice. The proceedings unfold across nine days: the prosecution builds an unrelenting case through mythic retellings and domestic dread. The collection refuses catharsis or resolution. The closing argument, “The Acqua Alta,” erupts into a nine-canto baroque apocalypse in which Venice drowns in a punitive flood of body fluids and storm surge. Whether the vanished court reporter’s final, fractured testimony or the work of an inheritor who shaped these pages, Spanish Fly continues to circulate quietly—passed hand-to-hand like evidence from a proceeding that never ended. Graphic, exhausting, and formally brilliant, it is not a lament but a prosecution that refuses to conclude.
