RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksMartin confronts more complex challenges in the form of relentless, flame-ferrying heat and chronic pain in her new memoir ... She’s at her most compelling, though, looking inward to examine lived experience and the often problematic or insufficient narrative frameworks in which those experiences are couched ... The book rejects tidy generic bounds.
Kate Zambreno
PositiveThe Chicago Review of Books\"Zambreno’s book gathers a series of diary-esque recordings. Straddling two years, her baseline subject matter is domestic, replete with the quotidian sensations, colors, and textures of cramped pandemic life. Expansion occurs through Zambreno’s wide-ranging and deeply felt artistic preoccupations ... This appreciation of the possibilities posed by small, dense worlds is also reflected by Zambreno’s prose: her delicate balancing of verbs and nouns in particular registers as simultaneously deft and weighty, carrying the various, erratic contentments which might be discovered beneath bedsheets or behind kitchen shelves in all their cozy specificity ... one may question whether Zambreno fashions for her daughters a “light room” of their own in the end. Can such a room exist? After all, windows which allow for sun admit gray and clouds, too. To stay inside is to forgo the pleasures of the world outdoors, just as to remain outdoors is to ignore the myriad worlds within closer reach. If Zambreno offers us a windowed space, then, its blessing lies not so much in any sunlight refuge as in the clarity and breadth of the view it provides: that being is at once shorter and longer and smaller and larger than we can ever hope to know.\
