About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jamie Quatro
Rave The Washington Post I can’t shake the sense that the pages feel warm to the touch. I see, in my mind’s eye, her sentences threaded with muscle and sinew, letters glistening with sweat and blood ... The structure of Two-Step Devil gestures to its characters’ painful and disrupted histories through its own resistance to teleology.
Hannah Regel
Rave The Washington Post An evocative, aching riff on the epistolary tradition ... Regel is a poet ... She brings the same keen eye for human idiosyncrasy and the same intuitive muscular command of figurative language to The Last Sane Woman.
Claire-Louise Bennett
Rave The Nation Bennett supplies her readers with a charming, intellectually acrobatic shepherd, but one who holds herself ever so slightly in abeyance, resisting the full thrust of her emotions ... To be sure, Bennett is evoking a well-established mode of thinking about the practice of reading. But intellectual precedent renders Checkout 19 no less remarkable, and no less seductive in its lush collapse of the life of the mind and of the body. To read, to imagine, to write: These are neither departures from life, nor refuges from it, nor are they vehicles of transcendence. They are something more basic, Bennett suggests: They are life itself ... The narrator’s intermittent dips into body talk cohere elegantly with the text’s broader form ... It’s a dizzying yet mesmeric effect Bennett has wrought: to conceal nearly everything about her narrator, except for her desires, her impulses, her ambivalence ... a document of memory, wayfaring and cyclical. Content and craft align in this regard as well, like lyrics set to melody. Bennett’s prose is sensorial, and it swoops and roams in the lithe, playful manner that has come to distinguish her style. Keeping pace with a sentence can lift the stomach, like the gentlest carnival ride (again, reading is a thing the body does). When the text shifts into excerpts of the narrator’s own fiction—about an aristocratic dandy named Tarquin Superbus—it becomes gymnastic in its alliterative free association; sentences seem to turn pirouettes.
Briallen Hopper
Positive The New Republic Throughout the course of her debut essay collection, Hard to Love, Briallen Hopper contemplates this thorny and capacious emotion from the position of someone whose love life defies traditional conceptions of the term ... You could read Hard to Love as a tender missive to all the relationships American culture has overlooked and deflated ... Hopper’s book is also an argument for a social shift. Friendship is a choice, one that is often adventurous in and of itself and should command the same privileges and respect as any other domestic arrangement ... Hard to Love’s greatest accomplishment is its insistence upon the equality of platonic and non-matrimonial arrangements, not merely because it urges us to recalibrate our perception of kinship—although this is important—but because it disputes the capitalist logic that the institution of marriage so often serves to buttress. Hopper harpoons the archaic, yet sticky notion that marriage is the gold-standard for mutual reliance[.]
Laura June
Positive The New Republic Intertwining her experience of becoming a mother with the memories of her own, late mother, June reckons unflinchingly with the muck of motherhood and daughterhood without disavowing the precious particularities of both. Her book is less preoccupied than other recent works...with the disquietude inherent to choosing parenthood or with the agitated reconceiving of identity once she has become one; through the tapestry of memory, she tries to forge a new, more capacious narrative for her experiences of motherhood, one that situates pain and pleasure alongside one another, where they neither compete nor cancel each other out ... her memoir nimbly laces together the yen for a legible history with the uncompromising assertion that we can only own the choices we make. And even then, we have to contend with the fissures and contingencies ... Now My Heart Is Full doesn’t debate the pros and cons of having children, or take on the futile task of defining a mother’s role. Instead it offers tender ambiguity, indicating that something as overdetermined as a \'mother\' can never mean precisely what we want or expect or fit the contours of our fluctuating hopes.
Abby Norman
Positive The New Republic Too often, a woman’s pain is not merely met with doubt, but suspicion, both within the medical community and outside of it. Author and activist Abby Norman, has put decades of labor—including careful, independent medical study—into studying this phenomenon ... As Norman communicates so powerfully, a woman’s relationship to her pain is a snarled coil of memory and socialization. The pangs of Norman’s endometriosis intersect with barbed memories of childhood—and with the legacy of a mother who subsists on the pain of hunger ... perhaps as Norman and others keep speaking—keep articulating the essential pain of being a woman in this world—the time-tested strategy of doubt will shatter.