RavePopMatters... more than an exploration of a famous piece of music. It\'s a wonderfully smart, fascinating look at Chopin\'s life and times ... There are, of course, already several biographies of Chopin out in the world. LaFarge\'s slim book—only 160 pages—stands out because it\'s a hybrid work—biography and journalism—with utterly lovely, vivid descriptions of Chopin\'s music. It\'s all the more compelling because LaFarge looks carefully at the circumstances that made the composition of Opus 35 possible ... The 19th century history in this book is seamlessly interwoven with the journalism exploring Chopin\'s sound and message. LaFarge moves between the past and present seemingly without effort ... In her book, [LaFarge] doesn\'t attempt to rescue Chopin from this reputation, but her precise description and thoughtful analysis of Opus 35 somehow do that job ... If only all the great composers could be reintroduced to us in this fashion.
Mark Doty
RaveThe Adroit Journal... stunning ... Doty invites readers to see Whitman as a human being rather than an inscrutable genius ... [Doty] provides just what is necessary to bring Whitman into focus as the distinctly American poet who offered fresh thinking about desire, selfhood, and the possibilities of language. Which is to say that Doty hasn’t written a conventional, cradle to grave biography of Whitman. He has written something richer and more seductive ... a book of candid, ardently written meditations that illuminate Whitman’s life as an artist, the poems in Leaves, and what it means to be a desiring human body ... The surprise in this book is not what Doty identifies as sources but rather how beautifully he rhapsodizes about these influences while distilling the poems in Leaves so that we can grasp Whitman’s essence and vision of humanity ... These memoir pieces are unsparing and often immensely moving ... compulsively readable because [Doty] tracks his personal relationship with Whitman’s poems. His mind, heart, and aesthetic shimmer brightly in these pages, which both celebrate and constitute a singular work of art.
Lisa Olstein
RaveThe Adroit JournalInstead of settling for the idea that her pain is indescribable, she lays down shimmering prose that subtly unhinges the reader, conveying what it’s like to see the world from a migraine’s point-of-view. Pain Studies is, as a result—and this is just for starters—a fascinating look at what can happen when you attempt to pour pain into language ... Pain Studies is all the more powerful because its content is echoed by its form. It builds in fragments and bursts of prose. Its colors are vivid and brilliant. And if it’s difficult to sum up, that is because it faces in many different directions. Moreover, the book is acutely influenced by the pain Olstein writes through and around ... A profound, challenging work, Pain Studies works on the reader like poetry, revealing what Olstein calls radical malleability: language’s, ours. It is truly a dazzling addition to the literature on pain.
