RaveFriezeSuccinctly dazzling ... The narrative is rendered fast and sharp in prose-poetry that slips trippily forward and backward in time ... The lion’s confusion and trauma seep into our own, nurturing a kind of interspecies empathy without sliding too far into anthropocentric fantasy ... The magic of this approach is fatefully strained, then, when the lion meets a human and the two worlds must actually interface. Love finally emerges, but it feels much closer to capture.
Madeline Gins, Ed. by Lucy Ives
RavePIN-UPEverything becomes sticky, sensitive, and sentient; in Gins’s world, to read is to become atmospheric — words pass through you and shimmer in a mist of meaning ... Madeline Gins was an artist and writer obsessed with the phenomenological experience of writing — both in the intimate experience of reading as much as its capacity to serve as a social art form. A succinct but graceful introduction by Ives locates Gins perfectly in that heady post-war art scene of New York ... for Gins, words are nothing if not physical. It’s their physicality that protects them from perfect comprehension ... The inherent confusion of language is of course her tactic, for to reach full clarity is to resume gravity. And that’s why experiencing Gins’s writing in print — at long last — is so necessary. The Madeline Gins reader feels like how I imagine living in a Reversible Destiny house feels — like floating, like hovering, really, in a cloud of mist. While stuck inside your familiar four walls, lockdown is the perfect time to dive in.
