PositiveThe Kenyon ReviewMuch of Arnett’s talent rests in depicting the places where her characters hover between seclusion and exposure, between never talking to the people around them to revealing their sex lives in a menagerie to their family members ... Mostly Dead Things holds no punches and, between running over peacocks with golf carts and skinning cancerous quadrupeds, finds a messy and believable love that depends on enduring the repulsive and rapturous in the same collection of nerves. What elevates Mostly Dead Things beyond a post-funeral rumination with a background of stuffed fauna is Arnett’s ability to complicate what death means. This novel favors presenting death in a way that privileges the personal over the universalizing or pedantic ... But Mostly Dead Things goes beyond even this fascinating dichotomy of how we understand and treat different bodies to suggest that death does not end a person entirely ... The problem with death in Mostly Dead Things is not its finality, rather, it’s what death still leaves open, what bodies it does not allow to be posed in static and reverent recreation.
Tiana Clark
PositiveThe Kenyon Review\"The collection moves on to have conversations with Phillis Wheatley, Kanye West, and Nina Simone; it invokes the myth of Orpheus and Rihanna’s music; and it adapts lines from Toni Morrison’s Sula. This intertextuality of much of Clark’s work contextualizes her use of language and the personal nature of much of her poems ... Clark’s poems converse with each other as well, often mentioning a previously described event from a new or more detailed angle, allowing the book to become a work which asks to be read sequentially and as a whole to be best comprehended. These pieces invite the reader to witness the past as a mobile and volatile thing that inevitably relates to and impacts our present ... Moving through I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, the reader tours a work that is part autobiography, part dialogue between a mottled history and a contemporary persona. At the synthesis between these two narrative lines, Clark reaches the communicated revelation that the title partially suggests—no body exists without historical association and context in this world and more specifically, this America which is anything but post-racial. Clark unveils an individual history which irrevocably belongs to a world history, as well as vice versa, in this collection that educates as well as artfully brings a life into a legible and concrete experience.\
