PositiveThe RumpusDunce is described as a return to form; Ruefle’s last release, 2016’s My Private Property, was a collection of prose—but her prose is always like poetry, and Dunce immersed me like a novel. Was it her intention to trace the cycle of life, from birth to its end? ... a book over which death casts less of a shadow and more a funnily shaped cloud, hovering and darkening the bright spots (now you can gaze more clearly) ... Reading Dunce, I felt, with no irony: how dare I not cherish—every day—the color of a flower? Such is the porousness of Ruefle’s written tableaux, along with her gratitude ... Everything is worth thinking about, so Ruefle fills all the lacunae with weight, memorializes them.
Lorna Simpson
RaveHyper AllergicThere’s a real joy to be gleaned from the collages, the near-tenderness with which Simpson adorns her subjects.... Simpson is in [her subjects], though she’s always toed the line between autobiography and storytelling narrative, that space where the two collapse into each other. The binary between them is dissolvable and soluble, like paint.
Sheila Heti
PositiveBOMBSheila Heti’s Motherhood is less a novel than the denouement of a biblical story its narrator habitually returns to: Jacob wrestling with God ... Because the question of motherhood is slippery, the philosophical musing of Motherhood is anxious but gentle, as full of doubt and tenderness as the protagonist herself. It’s sensuous and velvety when she trusts her own babyless gut; then nervously meandering when she becomes dubious. The solipsism is frustrating (for the protagonist, and also for me—it’s the nature of ipseity to search for yourself within it), but luckily it’s cyclical, continually spiraling back to self-contained joy when she finds herself unabashedly grateful ... It’s a relief to watch matriarchal healing that doesn’t proceed forward with new generations but backward, when the living grow up, when women trust the quiet thing inside them, as alive as a baby.
