PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksShechtman is delightful when sly... and she sees the implications in every bit of linguistic play ... Yet I found myself wishing that the book could crack into spontaneous joy. Paradoxically, where I do find some of that spontaneity is in arguably the most formally wound part: a crossword itself.
Maggie Millner
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewCouplets are seductive, but a dangerous lilt, as too much of this good could easily tilt to light verse. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with fun! Millner’s not shy of whimsy and singsong ... Her puns punctuate, rather than dictate.
They’re best when they’re inevitable, part of the substrate instead of spotlit (as in the line break \'in Bed-Stuy with our playlist on\': too cleverly said) ... Though Couplets could be viewed from some angles as a novel, this book is straight-up as formal poetry as it can be, while, simultaneously, queering all binaries.
Katherine Dunn
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf Geek Love is, as the French say, jolie laide (ugly-pretty), then Toad is just ugly. Yet that doesn’t make it any less mesmerizing ... When tragedy hits with a wallop at the end, you’ve been so mired in melancholy you almost don’t realize how huge the punch is. Toad is sad, funny and, most of all, deeply, unapologetically, ordinary ... Which is not to say that Toad is an ordinary book. It’s as weird as anything you’d expect from a writer this good at describing animal functions. Fluids and fats and flesh smack throughout ... Dunn never lets us get comfortable: Just when the lyrical sentences begin to soar, she yanks up the mellifluous prose and thuds down squat subject-verb-object clunkers ... She lays on vulgarities thick as butter ... Toad, with its single narrator speaking alone in her living room, lacks that kind of choral power. Yet Geek Love exists only because Dunn figured out how to feel through Toad. What Toad provides is a subtler embedding in an embodied life.
