RaveThe Masters ReviewThis is Masih’s third book, and it could just as well be described as a sketched map. Maps don’t need words for meaning to shine through. All you need is a key. Masih is working with the same type of silences that maps do ... The sensuality of the writing and its focus on the natural environment is perhaps the strongest quality in this book. Masih holds the same space for the hills, grasses, and snow, as for the myriad characters ... Masih writes almost all of the stories in the precarious present tense, where the past and the future rupture the moment, propelling the narrative forward with little for perspective ... Each character, one by one, acts instead of speaks. Each character makes a decision and then, one step at a time, continues into the sun, into the clouds, into the rushing grasses, leaving the reader with nothing but the story as a key.
Ocean Vuong
PositiveThe Masters ReviewThis new book of poetry is subdued ... It is hard to make an unfinished feeling into a warm one. But the book’s intimacy reaches out to readers, as if to say: you know when you know about what it’s like to lose someone you love ... Vuong’s style is achingly simple. With coherence to the rest of his work, Vuong refuses finality, but honors death by acknowledging the depth of grief, which is also the depth of love. He is not afraid of the word as a tool to take one step beyond fatalism. And in this brave act opens the realm of a possible infinite.
Edith Schloss ed. Mary Venturini
PositiveThe Rumpus... this book was like a rush of cold air into the lungs: It ferries through spectacular moments, then moves easily on ... Her writing is quiet, perhaps even naive. But Schloss is enamored by the minutiae of her subjects, and the exactness and delicacy of her details ripple out like water ... The pages of Loft Generation are a flow of colors and figures, an abstract painting in themselves, or a party where people are familiar, so close that you only see them as swaths.
