PositiveCleveland Review of BooksWhat sets Boyer apart from writers like her isn’t just that her work retains a political edge, refusing to refashion those frustrations into literature proper. It’s also that genre itself is always in question when it comes to her writings—is it essay or poetry, aesthetic or critical? How can writing resist its own passivity as a consumable object? As a question of cultural economy, it’s the classic artist’s lament about the commodification of their art, but Boyer prefers to ask the political form of the question: how does one write in good faith when words themselves are a condition of immiseration? ... . If these are essays, one gets the sense that Boyer’s definition of an essay is just poetry spilled out onto the page, an excess of words that can only be contained by the page’s margins ... Anne Boyer should be considered a properly American poet: not because she captures a national essence, but because she captures a democratic one ... If it’s true that when the chips are down, we won’t really need Marx, it’s because we will have writers like Boyer who, laboring in a world in want of repair, might give a sleeping sovereign a start.
