RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWith Millner’s well-attuned sense of metaphor, we know we are in good hands. Her verse is neat and supple ... Couplets is, yes, written in couplets, intermingled with sections of prose poetry. While couplets might recall the heroic verses of Geoffrey Chaucer or Alexander Pope, the word couplet in French can also mean a piece that is part of a hinge, a joint — a joining of two. Given this choice, I wondered if Millner’s poems would study the form of the couple, that standard that often defines love. And while Couplets does concern itself with romantic pairs... Millner has her eye not so much on the couple form per se, submitting to or resisting its allure, but on queerness as a form one inhabits. How does one form oneself as queer? ... While there is an air of destiny to the narrator’s first queer relationship, Couplets is suffused with the terrifying implications of creative will. You can shape your life — either through language or through love.
Fernanda Melchor, Trans. by Sophie Hughes
PositiveBookforumWhat rescues Hurricane Season from triteness is Melchor’s virtuosic prose, somewhat effaced but not entirely blunted in translation. She writes of lives with specificity, with a crude recognition of their humanity that allows, if not for redemption or hope for those lives, at least some measure of peace for their dead ... Melchor’s sentences ensnare the reader within the characters’ delusions, their small, persistent faiths, their regrets, their resentments. Her prose is as ornate as Sebald’s, turning in on itself, forming fractal spirals of meaning. But while Sebald’s sentences have a stately, lecture-hall air to them, Melchor’s sound more like a drunk’s slurred tale. It’s the breathless monologue of good gossip or the bitter outpouring of religious profession, with no paragraph break, no gasp for air. What makes the writing mesmerizing is the almost imperceptible way that Melchor is able to inflect each character’s voice within the novel’s sustained tone of a close, omniscient third-person narration. The effect, subtle yet transfixing, is of a narrator slipping into each character as if slipping into a new skin, without collapsing into any stable \'I\' ... In the lives—and deaths—she writes, Melchor doesn’t \'give a voice\' to anyone. She carefully sets the altar, places an ofrenda, lights a candle, and listens.
Chloe Aridjis
MixedBookforumYou could describe Chloe Aridjis’s first two novels as mood pieces. Both have a Sebaldian preoccupation with the ways we are haunted by history ... At first, Sea Monsters appears to follow a similar path ... I cringed with recognition. How many adolescent girls have puffed up men with their enthusiasm into anything other than the wearisome drags they are? ... these specificities are dulled by the enduring cliché of Mexico as a repository of quirky illicitness. At moments, Aridjis satisfyingly parodies this stereotype ... Other times, perhaps despite herself, Aridjis writes the city as a holding pen for a cast of eccentrics ... Their arrival to the beach comes halfway through the novel. At this point, any remaining propulsion in the story is already languishing under the indifferent coastal sun ... Aridjis’s sentences are frothy enough to buoy Sea Monsters’s sluggishness, although at times their very airiness seems to evince the story’s vacuity of substance ... In her past work, Aridjis was able to ground her narrator’s scattered ruminations with the weight of history. In Sea Monsters, that sense of weight is absent.
