“If your hedonism makes you feel like a poet, then maybe you are doing it right,” writes Rachel Rabbit White in her glistening debut poetry collection, Porn Carnival. A poet, former sex worker, and somewhat infamous New Yorker, White’s poems are an apt embodiment of her personal brand: an orientation toward luxury that runs deep, divinely spiritual in its dedicated observance of the superficial. It’s a form of decadence where anti-capitalist ideology and the desire to experience its fruits might intertwine, where erotic labor is simultaneously a symptom of the society we live in and a means to transcend its expectations. Above all things, White strikes me as someone comfortable with the contradictions of the human experience—and in indulging them, her work reveals that seemingly conflicting desires often arise from the same source.

The same openness to change is evident in her own trajectory: White has recently abandoned her post as a star of the New York party scene and absconded to Mississippi to live with her fiancé, the formerly incarcerated American author Nico Walker, with whom she struck up a correspondence while he was serving a prison sentence for serial bank robbery. Best known for his semi-autobiographical debut novel Cherry, Walker is portrayed by Tom Holland in a 2021 film adaptation of the same name. Originally published in 2018, the story is one of distinctly American trauma: in the aftermath of the Iraq war, Walker returned from his stint as a combat medic psychologically shattered and spiraled into a life of crime and opioid addiction, finding that the rush of bank robbery mimicked the sense of calm focus he felt during combat. These days, he’s finding peace in more traditional ways—something else he shares with Rabbit White, who has taken the lifestyle pivot in stride, herself transitioning from “hooker laureate of the dirtbag left” to self-proclaimed pious bride. Broadcasting from their home in Mississippi, the pair joins Document to advise on all things love and sex.