RaveBrooklyn RailDog Days resists the sense of control implied by standard narratives—the polite fantasy of our own omniscience. Instead, LaBarge’s debut memoir turns to the potential of language as it fractures along an act of violence, reorienting us to ourselves and how that self might be more fully expressed ... I cried the first time I read this ... Beyond any climactic arc, there’s the quiet recognition, trailed by disbelief, of having arrived at your own epitaph ... Maybe the most generous aim of Dog Days is its embrace of the impossibility of return. A former innocence eludes us, but Eden defined by its borders, we learn, is a paradise foreclosed. Still, the search for redemption has sent us striving.
