“even as we all crowd the same body”: On Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa
To read Tetra Nova is to lean into nonlinear disorientation, flipping pages back and forth across time, scribbling in the margins of Vietnamese history.
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Erin Vachon
8 posts
Erin Vachon is the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large for The Rumpus. You can find their work at www.erinvachon.com.
“stones will know”: On Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood
Hood wonders how to write rape and its aftermath when its very nature is fragmentation, a form that disqualifies it as a story.
“It’d Be the Last Great Punk Song”: On ¡PÓNK! by Marcus Clayton
Punk is not safe, but neither is the world if you are Black or brown.
“Why Are You Still Resisting?”: On M.M. Olivas’s Sundown in San Ojuela
Olivas’s novel is a gross-as-hell ghost story and a razor-sharp vision of the present moment, a multi-narrator rollercoaster you’ll binge like your favorite television show.
“ew, don’t use my sound ever again”: On Tyranny and Poupeh Missaghi’s Sound Museum
Power is the end in itself, not a means to justice.
“A Game of Chance You Can Choose to Play or Not”: On Lauren Russell’s A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close
[Russell] creates breathing room by breaking genre expectations, so that everything invisible swoops into stark relief.
“I Am in Love With Moons”: My Lesbian Novel and To After That (TOAF) by Renee Gladman
But this is love: crying into your lover’s face until it becomes so ridiculous, that the event becomes absolutely precious.
“There Is No Page That Can Hold Me”: Sam Sax’s Yr Dead
By insisting that Ezra’s ordinary life is epic, Sax shows that every life must be epic, holding everyone accountable. No one can sit out.