PositiveLambda LiteraryBroken People, full of gorgeous meditations of quiet desperation like this, is a fever-dream account of whether any of us can change, whether our disappointments and discontents might forever disappear ... Sam’s cynicism of the process echoes in some way that of the reader. Lansky’s use of a trip to effect some deeper personal revelation is, while a bit flimsy, a strategy not to forget the body ... Lansky merges the florid, roving language of an unsettled mind with the churning, roaring, \'twisting and gawping\' sensations within Sam’s organs. This vivid interplay, disconnect, and tension offers readers a beautiful portrait of Sam the inconsolable initiate ... Lansky’s choice to turn the seemingly true events of his life into a work of fiction, through the rather harrowing aide-memoire of an out-of-body trip, creates the distance a work of self-examination requires.
Marina Benjamin
RaveThe Rumpus... sensitive, incantatory prose ... [Benmain\'s] attunement to these subtle shades of darkness transforms Insomnia from an elegy for her restlessness to a meditation on how to discern the amorphous, blue-black chaos we each carry within ourselves ... For those fortunate enough never to know the agony of insomnia, Benjamin’s writing mimics the feeling of what she calls a \'turbocharged\' mind, careening through its thoughts, fighting to temper itself ... reads like a brief fugue, a reverie we realize we might have been missing each night ... One finishes her book as if emerging, ironically, out of a dream: we cannot say how long it lasted, only that the sensation will, we hope, stay with us for a while ... Benjamin may have intimated insomnia’s longue durée through her survey of art and letters, but those insights don’t seem premised on her sleepless state. Rather, the neuroses and ruptures I’m after seem to remain couched somewhere in Benjamin’s psyche, obscured even from herself ... Nevertheless, with keen brilliance, Insomnia punctures the myth of sleep as an undisturbed state ... Rather than abandon the sleepless, or let them endure without remedy, Insomnia gives to us so that we may give to one another.
