Brutalities

Stuck in a quarantine in a desert city in the American Southwest during a high-risk pregnancy, Margo Steines watches her world shrink to the size of her swelling body. That confinement pushes her to examine the violence bound up in its history.

Her earlier lives offer the material for this reckoning. She has worked as a professional dominatrix in New York City, lived as a homestead farmer in a cruel relationship, welded on a crew building high-rises, and trained in mixed martial arts. Each of these roles shows her a different side of how power and masculinity fuse together, and how far she could drive her own body.

The book traces the roots of her early attraction to pain and follows her path toward gentleness and love. It is candid in its telling, refusing to soften what it reveals.