Sketch Book Reviews: Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners
Seeley uses historical studies, new findings, charts/graphs, and his absolute love of bees to teach readers.
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Reviews
To Mother, To Remember, To Survive: A Review of Sun Yung Shin’s The Wet Hex
To be a mother is to have strength, resilience, and ferocity in the face of oppression. It is also to contain the magic and power of creating a new life, of bringing up children, of making a home and a legacy.
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Of Streets and Saints: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Boys Alive and Theorem
Considered together, these novels trace the triumph of consumerism over rebellion, the bourgeoisie over the underclass, capital over life.
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Human and No Less Miraculous: The Craft of Explication in Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca
Within Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.
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Imprisoned by Insomnia: Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq
Memoir is less common territory for Darrieussecq, but with insomnia, she has found a real-world subject appropriate for her ongoing concerns about making sense of the absurd.
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Giving Voice to Illness: A Comparative Review of Three Recent Cancer-themed Collections
All three poets contemplate the female body and the voice both literally and metaphorically, appealing to outside powers as they ponder how much a person can bear.
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To Feel Complicit in a Broken System: Geoffrey D. Morrison’s Falling Hour
There is impressive control in the deployment of these mind spirals, with Morrison integrating link after link into a narrative that grows more complex but keeps all its many balls in the air, the kind of juggler who satisfies and surprises with what he is able to toss into the mix.
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When the Underworld Comes Knocking: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto
“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again,” recalls Officer Munson. And on this fateful night, he wants Carney to play again, this time with deadly stakes.
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Nonbinary Thinking: Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids
We’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
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The Trap of Domesticity: Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo
Between a stream-of-consciousness-inspired prose, image patterns, and consistent pivots of thought, Kanai establishes the most surprising thing about this novel: its ability to make the vertiginous hypnotic.
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The Mind of a Female Killer: My Men by Victoria Kielland
But while Cather’s eponymous Antonia rises above rumor and gossip through resilience, optimism, and an irresistibly endearing authenticity, forging happiness on her own terms, the story of Kielland’s Belle is alternatively uncomfortable and haunting.
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Reveling in the In-Between: J. Estanislao Lopez’s We Borrowed Gentleness
This humor, fresh in its irreverence, is welcome alongside other poems that read darker and more cynical as they grapple with survival and death.
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A Ratio of Give and Take: Joyce Carol Oates’s Zero-Sum
Here, what is given, what is taken or refuted, what is owed engenders the myriad methods her characters use to shift responsibility or culpability away from themselves and onto others.
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In Ardent Defense of Intellect: Susan Sontag’s On Women
Sontag parses out how women were—and are—patronized, idolized, romanced, and discarded based on proximity to their perceived expiration date, whereas men age without the same discrimination.
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Sketch Book Reviews: Mrs. S
Mrs. S asks readers to consider the the ways characters inhabit bodies, how we inhabit our bodies.
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As with Vigor, As with Pain: A Review of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Egger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.
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The Cost of Belonging: Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu
In this vortex of language and culture, the translator’s task is all the more essential and Jennifer Shyue’s translation from Spanish is both precise and poetic. In addition to the music of the prose, Shyue does justice to the multiple vernacular at play, bringing two unlike cultures into the portrait of a single man.
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The Burden of Being Real: Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special
To see oneself and one’s people as real: this is the only way out of the shadow of the special.
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Twenty-five Years Unbound: Reading a Book of AIDS
The range of prepositions used here in writing about how to write AIDS is indicative of the range of questions encompassed by the book, the range of the “brutal presence” of the disease.
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On abandoning words: Carlos Fonseca’s Austral
Hidden within all these constellations and labyrinths of philosophy is a love story and a story about the struggle of a writer to find meaning in words.
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Killing One to Save Many: Javier Marías’s Tomás Nevinson
Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.
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Confession of Grief: Katie Marya’s Sugar Work
Marya’s work is a slow burn; both sweet and salty, that picks up speed and ferocity as it unfolds.
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Imagining a Worst-Case Scenario: John Vaillant’s Fire Weather
The boreal forests around the town do habitually burn, and its residents were used to seeing flames over their skies in summer months.
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Animal as Metaphor: Erica Berry’s Wolfish
Living entities, with whom we cannot communicate fully, seduce us in their majesty.
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Recollections of a Non-Existence: Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X
“There was no con. There was no crime. There was only fiction.”
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Memory Among Landscape: Alissa Hattman’s Sift
. . . in a barren world with little protection and corners to hide, it’s also impossible to hide from our thoughts . . .
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Sketch Book Reviews: Night Vision
I love it when a book forces me to reassess my thinking on a particular subject.
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A Perfect Sketch of a Moment: Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures
“Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clear.”
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Female Trouble: Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black
If you want to evoke the idea of who someone really is, start by showing us what they see.
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The No-Man’s Land Between Art and Self: Seth Rogoff’s The Kirschbaum Lectures
We look for ourselves in literature—for comfort or for guidance—but the page rarely provides a clean mirror.
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