About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lindy West
Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... a manifesto for the post-Obama, pre-impeachment-investigation, #MeToo era ... The problem is, West’s \'you\' feels heavily focused on white, cisgender men while overlooking the fact that white women can be just as invested in white supremacy as their male counterparts. She draws a clear line between men and women when, in reality, both parties can be guilty of harmful perspectives regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum ... West never connects the dots to the bigger picture, where white women have been overrepresented in media since time immemorial while people of color — irrespective of size or intellect — are still fighting for visibility and freedom from menial, poverty-stricken or criminal roles (or all of the above) ... But West herself willfully ignores the ways that prejudice against the L.G.B.T. community intersects with so many other kinds of oppression — or else, just as damning, she simply doesn’t see it ... a fiery book from an admirable author, but a witch hunt has to cover all the angles if it hopes to have a real and lasting impact.
Percival Everett
Rave Book Riot The novel takes a turn when Everett inserts several chapters of My Pafology into the novel. I almost cackled while reading this section as I was on the subway for my morning commutes ... The book is very well-written and moves at a swimming pace. Everett plays with the ideas of the dual identity in Black artists, the myopic view that America has of Black people, and the limitations of our expression as we push towards greater recognition.
Morgan Parker
Rave The Poetry Foundation What’s most evident in Magical Negro is that there is nothing new under the sun. What has happened once will happen again. As a Black woman, this is a lesson that Parker has inherited and internalized. A history as muddied, as denied, and as multifarious as Black history inspires an artist such as Parker to take on many different personas and former lives. She embodies popular Black icons from photographs, music, and film, as in her poem about Diana Ross. She documents her own maturation as a Black woman, which includes meditations on, and resurrections of, the past and how she was conditioned. And, finally, she remains mindful of Black people, even those she’s never known but who bear a common heritage in their faces. Magical Negro is a reminder, finally, of the cycles of Black life, and Parker, moving fluidly through time and space, is a poet unafraid to immortalize them.
Kiese Laymon
Rave The New Republic \"Toward the end of the memoir, Kiese turns from his own experience to reflections on the victims of police brutality, such as Korryn Gaines and Tamir Rice... At first glance, the comparisons may seem tacked-on or belabored. After all, the memoir is about Laymon but his message is much larger. He’s not just writing to his mother and revealing himself to her. He’s also writing about his former and younger self, and bearing in mind of all the younger black people out there ... Heavy is not only a memoir but an exorcism of deeply embedded pains, and of missed opportunities to address those pains when they were inflicted ... [The book contains] many memorable and incredibly moving passages. Heavy is a nourishing, high-caloric book that is not meant to be consumed quickly. It is slow-paced, requiring one to savor each page. This is the portrait of a man who has lived and is not afraid to recognize his mistakes as well as those of other people. The particular kind of black male vulnerability Kiese Laymon has expressed is vital in our literary canon, and it should inspire others to follow.\
Danzy Senna
Positive The New Republic The release of New People six months after Donald Trump became president might be fortuitous. Although the conversation surrounding identity politics has become a much belabored point, still, to consider the alliances and nuances within race remains relevant ... as a novel, New People is not without its flaws. The story seems rushed, with dialogue that reads as too premature or out-of-place to be realistic. The ending may throw readers for a loop with its ambiguity, even if the open-endedness is compellingly provocative. But the question of 'Can you remember a time when you were really real?' reverberates on each page. Are any of these characters really real? Could they exist beyond the confines of their own knowledge of what it means to be black, or would they be destroyed by such a potentiality? What this novel succeeds in is creating a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive. She is as puzzling as she is alluring, even if one may finish the novel feeling as though the issues are unresolved. Maybe that’s just how it is to live a life that transcends what’s written on the page.
Kathleen Collins
Rave The New York Times Book Review Collins toys with human beings as shadows, who fade in and out of one another’s lives, and she carefully depicts how abandonment and attachment can be two sides of the same experience ... Collins truly understands her characters in all of their ambivalence and complexity, and she shows how respectability politics governs many of their lives, with devastating effects ... There is an impressive balance of candidness and lyricism in these stories ... Collins was a contemporary of Alice Walker and Jamaica Kincaid, and we should make room for her in the literary canon.