Reviews

Becoming-language

On TC Tolbert's 'Gephyromania'

TC Tolbert’s poetry collection Gephyromania plays with, problematizes, and bridges various subjectivities and concepts of the body, identity, and text. Throughout multiple readings, Tolbert’s language creates a sustained state of anticipation, evoking a feeling of bodily movement (in both reader and author) not inappropriate for a volume whose title refers to an obsession with bridges. A bridge both separates and unites, just like a long-distance communication. What follows here is a review in the form of an unsent epistolary blast.

Dear Aaron Shurin

Michael Kelleher

April 16, 2013

Dear Aaron Shurin,

I started reading Citizen on a train from Grand Central Station to New Haven last Friday. I’d had a meeting in the city in the morning. Afterwards I met my friend Paul for lunch. I caught the 1:34 train. It was raining. On the way into the city, I finished reading C, a novel by Tom McCarthy. I had figured this would happen, so I brought your book for the ride home.

Perfect bound suckling (soma)tic reading enhancement

Rachel Glaser's 'Moods'

CAConrad

Find a book at Flying Object you love, like Moods by Rachel Glaser. Slip it under your shirt and hold it in place while extending your belly, feeling for the poems to kick with a muffled laugh. Walk through the building singing lullabies, rubbing your book baby growing beneath the folds of your shirt-vagina. Give birth on the floor or couch, or privately in the bathroom. Be careful not to tear or bend its little cover or pages to prevent costly surgery and recovery.

Eating the book review

On Becca Jensen's 'Among the Dead'

Toby Altman

A fairly precise list of the things I ate during the two days I wrote this review of Becca Jensen’s Among the Dead: Ah! and Afterward Yes!

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

7:01 a.m. While I wait for the water to boil, I press my finger to a dirty plate and pick up a few crumbs of chocolate cake. They’re hard from sitting in the sink all night but still very rich. I feel a little sick almost immediately. The water boils. I take the dog out.

Performing crip/queer survival

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's 'Bodymap'

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s new book of poetry, Bodymap, insists we understand technology as “the practical application of knowledge.” This makes it possible for us to view survival as a set of skills and aesthetics, not as an end. Bodymap is a performance and a text, a love song to and an archive of working-class femme-of-color disabled experiences. Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha uses her hybrid poetic form and structure to center assistance and interdependency as a site of politicized cultural knowledge production, equipping oppressed individuals and communities with a multiplicity of generative “methods.”