RaveVogueWhat is it like to witness the oppression you have endured applied to someone else? That’s the conceit of The Power, or it will be, at least, for the women reading it ...novel depicts a world in which women, empowered by a genetic mutation that enables them to harness and wield electrical currents, ultimately find themselves capable of the same greed and cruelty as their male counterparts ...spends the first hundred pages or so of Neil Armon’s novel masterfully indulging her reader ...for some, like feminist fan fiction. But the most radical elements of Alderman’s dystopian creation are actually its subtleties ... The Power doesn’t necessarily hold the answers to what organizing principle we should rally around instead, except in the most simplified, biblical terms: safety, peace, love.
Anne Helen Petersen
PanBroadlyThough it's undeniable that each subject has made great gains in her field, Petersen's dedication to overstating the transgressive behaviors of female celebrities in service of the notion of subjectivity as empowerment rings hollow. Her line of inquiry reveals the collective progress lost—or at least plateaued—by mainstreamed claims to feminism, which are couched in a rhetoric of 'unruliness' that is really anything but ... Though these case studies can verge on tedious, they are a reflection of Petersen's Media Studies background, her desire to make theoretical concepts like abjection, intersectionality, and transnormativity easy to understand in the context of her pop-culture subjects ... The overdetermined analysis with which she dissects celebrity behaviors with the utmost gravity stretches the utility of words like radical, subversive, and activist until they hold everything, and mean nothing ... This is the hard fact that Petersen's work, like others of its kind, leaves out: how race, gender identity, sexuality, age, and size are deeply enmeshed in the capitalism we've let run amok with our futures.
Megan Marshall
PositiveThe New RepublicWhat Marshall’s revisit offers is an attempt to connect more fully than ever Bishop’s poetics with the facts of her personal life — a synthesis of life and work that becomes a beguiling prospect when its subject is the famously private Bishop ...Marshall’s biography tells us about what the current market demands of women writers, and the origins of this impulse for more, more, more ...the power of the poetry fades inside Marshall’s chronicling, so concerned it is with finding autobiography in Bishop’s poems ... The narrative that Marshall is looking for in Bishop’s life is wholly too neat and sweet, and eclipses the real struggles of her subject: a writer who was not at home in the world, not comfortable with exposing herself, but who still created work of arresting beauty.
