PositiveZYZZYVA... a series of intricate poetic frames that reveal, through spotless deadpan delivery, the absences with which we live ... Shapero’s poetics are those of compulsive association, allowing her to land vast, connective leaps in just a few lines ... What was fairly called \'dark humor\' across her earlier collections has been become even more grim in Popular Longing ... Popular Longing chronicles the infinite ways we make sense of loss, or fail to—through funerals and burials, cremation and re-incarnation, an exhibit of empty frames left waiting on the wall.
Pola Oloixarac, tr. Adam Morris
PositiveZYZZYVA... as much as the novel delights in self-referential jabs at the state of contemporary letters (and there are many), the real rewards of this curious, compelling book lie with the mysterious Mona, and the questions that gather around her ... wary of the cultural expectation to view certain facts of an author’s identity—gender, nationality—as stand-ins for their writerly essence ... makes it clear that it, too, is implicated—its prose wriggling beneath characters’ claims about what a novel ought to be ... It would be easy for the sum of these meta-inserts to make Mona a book of artifice or brittle irony. But, fortunately, the twin hearts of the novelistic form—interiority, consciousness—at last begin to beat within our impenetrable Mona ... As an ending, it’s both entirely unexpected and not wholly warranted. But with it, the significance of Basske-Wortz, as well as the literary drama of the past few days, fades swiftly away. What remains is Mona.
Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
RaveZYZZYVAWhat emerges in these pages—via exacting translations by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman—is an unblinking investigation of the self: its inconsistencies, its ties to others, its basic wish to be understood ... Ditlevsen is a uniquely spatial writer, and childhood, for her, has the shape of a coffin: sharp-edged, narrow, a thing you \'run up against\' ... Humming beneath these scenes is her abiding interest in the relationship between literature and reality ... Ditlevsen is supremely engaged in a sense of truth. It’s a truth that is shifting and precarious, but always there—even in her most ruinous moments. Within The Copenhagen Trilogy, her truths appear again and again, awaiting a reader to find them, to listen, to understand.
Imbolo Mbue
PositiveZYZZYVA... an epic chronicle of lives played out under the shadow of this question. The narrative appears in long chapters told by individual villagers and a chorus of children, who speak in a roomy third-person plural ... Mbue wisely avoids any prescriptive authorial claims about [what] is most ethical ... What might have become a tidy blueprint for social resistance—complete with the \'happy ending\' those journalists raised—instead evolves into something more wounded, and less certain: an exacting account of what survives in the face of justice deferred. Even as Kosawa grows uninhabitable—too contaminated, too dangerous—there are still villagers who ask, as they always have: \'What do we do now?\'
