RaveThe RumpusI clutched [the book] a lot and sighed heavily while I read, underlining so much of it with my stubby pencil that it’s now a field of text, gray smudge, and exclamation points ... The Freezer Door is like a novel that reads like a memoir. It’s a treatise that feels like a long prose poem. It’s fragmented and yet it skips along like a pop song. It’s aphoristic and daily at the same time. It doesn’t worry about your hang-ups because Sycamore is beyond that shit. She’s too smart for that, and we should be, too. Sycamore writes about community, gentrification, white supremacy, queerness, being trans within queer spaces, fucking, love, housing, Seattle, San Francisco, cities and our love for them, trauma, sexual assault, chronic pain, solitude, and longing—all with rare candor ... Sycamore wrote this book long before pandemic time, and yet it couldn’t have arrived at a better moment. You need it. I did, and still do.
Garth Greenwell
RaveThe RumpusI could have read Cleanness in a day ... it’s hard to put down. But I was doing what I sometimes do with lovers; I was taking my time with it because I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to savor every word, sentence, paragraph, and chapter, and I wanted to love the body of that book, the way Greenwell’s characters love each other’s bodies ... The book seems to ask us, in subtle, erotic, beautifully honest ways, what it means to traffic in...roles and how none of them quite ever fit because we are all so much more fluid than they allow us to be ... I haven’t ever read anything like this; it’s tender and rough, slow and fast, hot and scary, and when I finished it I held it to my heart in gratitude to see kink laid bare, sex and violence made manifest for all of us to see, and in awe of what it must have taken to write it.
