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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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Mrs. S asks readers to consider the the ways characters inhabit bodies, how we inhabit our bodies.
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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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Living entities, with whom we cannot communicate fully, seduce us in their majesty.
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“There was no con. There was no crime. There was only fiction.”
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Though this account is full of wounds, losses, and hardships, the Sonia who emerges herein speaks of them with the kind of sinewy, bracing directness you would expect of a complete stranger sitting across from you at the bar.
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The earth is fertile ground for seeking one’s roots and connection to others.
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Gravity is what tethers us to the earth and to those we love, but it is also what we are constantly trying to escape. Anchor is about both these states—the holding on and the letting go—and the tension between them.
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. . . language is duplicitous. To be broken is perhaps to be part of a process (or a metaphor for life), where to bend (and survive) also leads to being broken. In this context, the word “broken” in “Reverse Engineer” might well point to a hard-won success.
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The Last Days . . . has nothing much to do with tennis or with Roger Federer, who appears sparingly in these pages . . . [nor is it] “intended to be a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally.”
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“If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself, squarely and deeply.”
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a portrait of the American tendency to keep the suffering of others at arm’s length as if misfortune were contagious, or to ruthlessly eliminate it entirely
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How would that candy taste in my mouth? How would that blue chiffon offset my dark hair and plain features? How would the world look to me through the eyes of this woman and this one and this one? What else could oblivion mean to me, if not for the living as many?
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You Made A Fool organically makes the argument that friendships can be just as important and fulfilling as romantic relationships.
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“Crystal” was really her name. She was always as gentle as she could be. I am grateful to her for that.
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“When you look at the colonial system, one of the things they want to eradicate is the native language, because they don’t understand what’s going on and they can’t control it.”
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I hear the gossip of flowers / insatiable in their lust / Consider the cages that are our bodies
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Throughout the collection New York City reflects a unique landscape of loss, a space as full of grief as it is of everyday life, scientific facts, memory, motherhood, healing, love, and hope.
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Above all, The Red Zone is a story of intimacy and love, in both substance and form.
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. . . in the end, the poem is its own witness to something indefinable with which the poet is engaged. Whatever the poet thinks it is, the poem itself is the vehicle, the container, describing itself and gesturing beyond its words.
...moreFirst, the Picasso Blues. This weekend’s reviews included a revealing summary of Bonnie Zobell’s book, What Happened Here, by Anna March, and Jac Jemc’s collection, A Different Bed Every Time. In the former, Zobell employs a cast of characters from the North Park area of San Diego to give us a “tremendously well-written take on […]
...moreAs with much French poetry, the idée fixe of King of a Hundred Horsemen concerns the problematics of desire, and several of the passages are so euphonic in the original that quoting from the translation may lessen the overall effect for a potential reader.
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