About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jorie Graham
Rave The Cleveland Review of Books The poems in Runaway maintain the usual dynamism and brilliance of Graham’s past collections, which, taken together, constitute an incisive and reverent study of the depths of human truth and mortality. Runaway, in a sense, leaps ahead of the pack, mimicking its title. The collection is Graham’s examination of a world that feels new again, a meditation on the poet’s newfound cluelessness in our rapidly changing world. It’s a collection for the moment, filled with the urgency of a poet’s debut work, and rife with a consistent sense of rushing, of tripping over one’s own words ... a work cleanly broken up into four numbered sections—perhaps as counterweight to the frenetic energy within the poems themselves—Graham gives us a sensation of flooding, of running over, of words pooling and collecting as lines pulse and gather momentum while moving quickly down the page and into one another ... A master of experimental language ... crushing.
Emma Cline
Positive Ploughshares ... investigates the shadier corners of the human experience, exploring the fault lines of power between men and women, parents and children, and the past and present. Cline deftly interrogates masculinity and the fates of broken relationships, examining violence on both a societal and personal level ... Cline’s prose is subtle and sophisticated and, as always, her language does heavy work establishing a sense of atmosphere ... Cline speaks to the purpose, and power, of fiction—that its pleasure comes in shaping and experiencing a life not our own, that often, it’s someone else’s life we find most compelling ... the stories in Daddy are powerful and compelling, but Cline manages to provoke us with just the title of this collection alone.
Ottessa Moshfegh
Rave Cleveland Review of Books The book is an extension of what Moshfegh has always so brilliantly done: a darkly comic, brutal examination of the mucky corners of the human condition with electric prose that chills—like a smile with blood-stained teeth ... we’re reminded of Moshfegh’s skill in blending a character’s inner consciousness with their perceived reality, an act so seamless that it nearly deceives the reader into believing it’s all true ... despite all its darkness and postmodern cynicism, Mosfegh’s fiction is often about living.