PanThe BafflerAmbitious ... Possanza uses her own life as map, evidence, and spackle ... This technique is not always so graceful ... Possanza’s use of first-person can at times smudge her critical lens ... The marketing copy describes Lesbian Love Story as a perfect fit \'for readers of Saidiya Hartman and Jeanette Winterson,\' but absent a deeper engagement with Hartman, Possanza seems to imply her methodological approach sprang, fully formed, from her own imagination ... Possanza has a frustrating tendency to expound on a subject for several paragraphs, several pages—in one case a jaw-dropping twenty pages—before lackadaisically mentioning the researcher whose work she has been relying on ... Possanza...adopts a moralistic, didactic tone throughout Lesbian Love Story that feels more appropriate for children’s literature.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
MixedThe BafflerMoves fluidly between lesbians, mostly artists from the turn of the century—so many lesbians that it may be hard to keep track if you aren’t already well-versed in their history. Her fragments are Sapphic, her fictions are Woolfian ... She does not demarcate what’s real, what’s invented. Letters, diary entries, and essays become narration and dialogue; other elements are fabricated wholesale ... Schwartz more directly situates her work as a successor to Sappho’s fragments and Woolf’s queer fictional biographies ... By putting Woolf and her work on a pedestal as some kind of apotheosis of lesbianism, Schwartz sails gaily away from history as it actually happened toward an idyllic vision of lesbianism’s future ... Like Sappho’s fragments, the archive is constituted as much by what’s missing as what is there. There are no trans women in After Sappho.
Anna Moschovakis
RaveToronto Star (CA)An uncanny mirror for our current moment, Participation takes us into uncharted waters ... There is not what we might call a true \'scene\' in Participation for thirty pages or so. The reader must situate themself with little support from the author ... At the same time, Participation is full of \'translators, interpreters, mediators, therapists, negotiators\'— pathfinders, in other words. The reader is in good company ... The text becomes more fluid and open to interpretation, the reader must take a leap of faith in favour of something inventive, collaborative, imperfect and new ... This is Moschovakis’ magic trick: by withholding cohesion, the reader must work to meet her in the middle (must, in other words, participate) ... Experimental, brilliant, and deeply moving, Participation offers an anti-guide for the current moment: not teaching us how to live, but inviting us to try.
