PositiveBarrelhouseWhether writing the memory of lazy a day on the Jersey Shore or the visceral image of smeared blood on book spines, Noble molds her prose into the shape she needs to crack a feeling open. What is perhaps more intriguing—and at times challenging—about Be With Me Always is that there is no central theme to these micro essays ... The unifying thread is instead a unified method of inquiry, a willingness to transform and meet each subject on its own terms—and then to flit away ... [Billings\'] work is a testimony that it is not always the big, traumatic moments that haunt us, but also the small, flirtatious ones that creak and stir, never fully revealing their ghosts ... Like a girl, perfumed, attempting to become a flower, Noble’s essays try to become the things they describe; her work reminds us of the labor, and the ingenuity, needed to thoroughly examine a life.
