RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksLike the best literary heroines, Heart Radical’s protagonist declines again and again with each new turn of the story to be subsumed by the men she meets in her travels. Even in the confusion and darkness that guides much of her odyssey, this self-professed quiet, heteronormative good girl nevertheless listens until she can hear her body and mind. To do so, she leans on her senses, on art, literature, dance, meditation, and mostly language. This writer digs until she finds and exposes that deeply human hum. Her prose is at its best in the story’s most vulnerable moments ... The narrative choice to look back from middle age at her travels 20 years ago brings an important complexity that works to pull the story forward. A creative writing professor, Kellor seems to understand this, and it is her expert framing of her younger self’s search for her true nature through the lens of language acquisition that forms the book’s spine. The most charming among these tensions are the contradictions ... Kellor has made a unique and tender contribution to the conversation about what it means to be fully alive.
Claire Vaye Watkins
RaveAltaTo call I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness a novel about maternal ambivalence would be to get only halfway there. Watkins’s intentions here are more elusive: she wants us to consider our unexamined reactions, to question why it is still a political act for a woman to seek pleasure ... Watkins’s prose is catlike—sleek, elegantly designed, and unconcerned with convention ... So much love emanates from I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness. It is an insider’s story, often told in code, using the hidden language of the body.
Garth Greenwell
RaveThe Coachella ReviewIn his new book Cleanness, a series of stories structured in three tidy parts of three chapters each and so tightly linked one could call it a novel, Greenwell applies the unique pressure of sex on scene and character, as he says, to drive the narrative ... One could read Greenwell for the intimacies alone, the slowing and dissecting of human connection, the tiny cues between lovers ... But more important, I think, one goes to Greenwell to remember that we are not all clean, all dirty, all good, or all bad. He compels us to examine that which is monstrous inside us ... In a moment when so many of us are at work negotiating our right to take up space in a world that asks us to make ourselves small, Greenwell gives us a story of desire and shame so very specific as to be universal.
