PositiveThe Chicago Review of BooksThroughout the biography, seemingly simple choices—ending sentences with exclamations, or leaving readers with hypothetical questions—insert Gill’s enthusiasm and passion for Woolf and her oeuvre. Oftentimes, Gill even writes about herself in the first person; she includes the reader in her adventures learning about Woolf: \'…my Woolf-loving readers will be exclaiming!\' Yet underlying this intimacy with her reader is a breadth of research that perhaps affords Gill such intimacy with Woolf, even when readers are left to wonder at moments that appear more conjecture than fact ... The tragedy of Woolf’s death is not overlooked, nor is her struggle with episodes of mania and depression. Such details, however, are an occasion for Virginia Woolf: And The Women Who Shaped Her World to celebrate Woolf’s strength and her ability to champion her voice for the sake of other women. There are salacious details to be discovered in Gill’s book, sure. Love triangles, mad fantasies. Gill’s discoveries about Woolf’s experiences in the Bloomsbury Group will prickle readers’ spines ... For fans of Woolf, the more tender moments will subsist longer ... Gill’s twenty-first century readers, keen to recognize and support movements that challenge those who abuse power, will find in this book not just a kindred spirit, but as in one of Woolf’s novels, a heroine.
Charles Wright
RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... a complex theater of images where the world appears strange yet cherished in Wright’s verse ... It’s appropriate that memories are treated as monadic quantities in Oblivion Banjo; Wright employs the past to create poetic moments in which he toys with his reader’s senses. The collection is neatly bound ... A kind of grappling occurs in Wright’s poems because of his many influences. Speaker and place intersect, only to be wrested apart by memory; place and God entwine, until God exits. It makes one wonder: if \'poetry is the fiction we use to prove the fact,\' is there truth within Oblivion Banjo? It may only be a subjective one for both poet and reader: a line that rings the bell of memory, a turn of phrase that hurts too closely, a metaphor suggestive of a secret joy ... Happy and without a name for everything — every moment — Wright has a manner of knowing uncertainty. As he’s done throughout his career, he leaves his reader wondering what language can aspire toward: how poetry unties the tongue-tied muse of memory.
