RaveThe RumpusThe author resists spinning the grisliness of giving birth into a romance cleansed of pain, and it is exhilarating to take a square look at the body in birth ... lines make magic by changing the definition of recklessness. What could be more reckless, more frightening, more freeing than loving the little life you’ve made? ... there is something that just feels existentially right about the way DeColo’s poems treat birth—or, the way birth ruptures her poems. The images intrude. The stuff no one talks about...keeps surfacing ... The poems in I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World reveal \'birth story\' to be the container I suspected it was, with walls and limits, but birth is so excessive, so ultimately uncontainable by narrative. In DeColo’s poems, birth appears scattered, and it crops up, and it is grotesque, and it is glorious, and for all the language she’s found to let it express itself, nonetheless her speaker \'would give birth a million times / over and not tell anyone about it / if [she] could feel that kind of way again.\'
Rebecca Solnit
PositiveThe Chicago Review of BooksOrwell’s Roses reads like a journey of discovery of the unfamiliar Orwell, first by Solnit, then by us. The first time through the book is exhilarating; it is almost impossible to predict where Solnit will go next. Readers are beneficiaries of Solnit’s erudition and eccentric research trajectories, and we learn much that would be hard to imagine fitting into a more conventional biographic narrative. There is a sense that Solnit has spun a perfect orb web, has organized all the tidbits, and has revealed a connected spiral that presents Orwell in new light ... Yet on subsequent readings of Orwell’s Roses, as I tried to trace all the book’s connections, it became clear that Solnit’s web is not as meticulously built as it seems. It is a bit more of a tangle than a neatly constructed orb, with associative lines of thought that have their own inner logic but which Solnit must wrestle back to the book’s central theme, such as her reflections on the Orwell family’s ties to slavery and imperialism.
Alice Quinn
PositiveThe RumpusTogether in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic [...] is a collection in and of the wreck, calling readers back to the spring, when the anthology’s editor Alice Quinn summoned some of poetry’s brightest lights, from Jericho Brown to Li-Young Lee, Ada Limón to Fanny Howe—about a hundred in all ... In its imagery and mood, the collection feels distinctly April. The poems conjure senior shopping hours and empty shelves in the toilet paper aisle, how the supply chain seemed simultaneously to be drying up and overfull ... The collection thus pulls the reader back to the spring, and so many of its insights feel recognizable, not least of which is the awe that many of the poets express that spring has come at all ... Reading these poems in January, we can only notice how the cruelty has gone on and on and intensified.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
RaveThe Nation...a definitive account of how deeply invested white women were in the slave economy of the South. Jones-Rogers’s book is a compendium of the actions taken by white women to preserve the wealth they had in human flesh as theirs alone. It scrupulously dismantles any image of slave-owning women as somehow less involved ... Jones-Rogers’s work also aligns with recent representations of slavery in popular media and historical fiction, which have revised their portrayals of white women as the myth of a special feminine compassion has begun to be dismantled ... Jones-Rogers continues to fill in the violent picture set out by these revisionary—which is to say, accurate—representations ... herein lies the greatest innovation of Jones-Rogers’s book—to show that the power white women wielded over enslaved people, reflected in horrific violence, extended into the economic structures of slavery ... They Were Her Property is a story of white women attaining power, and the book makes it undeniably clear that there is nothing inherently feminist or liberatory about the mere fact of women gaining power.
Julie Dobrow
PanLos Angeles Review of Books\"While Dobrow notes that these statements reflect Todd’s perspective, she retains very little critical distance between her own narrative and the story as it was told by her subject ... Dobrow’s willingness to follow Todd’s interpretation of events matters for a key reason. It seems to have caused Dobrow’s biography to skip over what we do know about Susan: that Emily Dickinson adored her ... Despite her attention to Todd’s experience as shaped by gender, Dobrow’s book mostly side-steps the story of Dickinson and Susan, perhaps because this story would seem to weaken her argument about Todd — that we should be happy that it was Todd, not Susan, who edited Dickinson’s poems, and we should be happy about this because Todd developed a deep and personal and mystical knowledge of Dickinson’s mind ... There’s also something symptomatic about Dobrow’s treatment of Susan, for in the larger sense, Dobrow has missed the opportunity to tell the great story of a whole set of brilliant women living under gendered constraints in 19th-century Amherst, and bursting through them ... There’s also great irony in Dobrow’s failure to see the alliances among women who despised each other — because it is Todd who teaches us this lesson.\
