Fleischmann is not wringing their hands but instead leaning into the world, constantly pressing at the corners of language ... I am astonished by how Fleischmann folds written language, as constrictive and limiting as it can be, into an open form ... Watchful of its context and position, this book is able to pose increasingly interesting, urgent, and difficult questions. It holds us accountable to the world. What are we doing about our global climate crisis? How can we pay reparations? How and when are we complicit in state violence? How do we move forward?
... a balancing act of various genres ... The narrative keeps a consistent thread of hunger and searching that is never frustrating and always disarming ... The political and social commentaries don’t feel saturated, even though they are a great part of what the author wanted to stress with this work ... Controversies and conflicts are present but T. Fleischmann speaks very naturally about them, regarding them as just another part of day to day life, and not dwelling on the topic ... We end up cheering for their resilience and esthetic stamina, their contagious impetus that exhorts us to go out and change the world. Or at the very least, try to.
A sharp memoir that explores gender, identity, and other complex, timely matters ... Throughout the book, identity remains as fluid as gender, as the author investigates both in interesting way ... Both provocatively and evocatively written, the book illuminates the process of becoming.
... magnificently uncategorizable ... deeply personal while at the same time keeping us at arm’s length; [is is] circular but also move through time ... calls itself an essay. But if that’s true enough — in the sense that the essay is meant to be capacious, to wander, to interrogate its content and its form — the designation ultimately reinforces the insufficiency of such tags to encapsulate the movement of an engaged body and mind ... effaces lines of genre as a strategy to efface, or disrupt, lines of self and gender.
... introspective and poignant ... [Fleischmann's] remark that between 'the epistolary or the journal, I try to have each at once' eloquently summarizes the form of a perceptive and compassionate narrative that beautifully breaks with the limits of genre and gender.
... explores art and relationships with a perceptive eye and beautiful prose ... Fleischmann’s friendships and romantic relationships — often intertwined — are the book’s emotional center. They approach their desires in a way that is alternately moving and self-deprecating ... Fleischmann undercuts the sadness before describing it, which softens the blow and produces a sense of longing instead. Fleischmann’s polymathic book exerts this type of control the whole way through, and to great effect.
... when the narrative shifts from prose into verse without warning, I barely notice the change, which is perhaps the sign of an ideal hybrid form ... a largely accessible entry into its narrator’s head ... holds your hand as it pulls you along, progressing so smoothly that you want to resist the urge to stop and underline sentences for fear of losing the engine of that thinking ... Clutch does not hide behind these metaphors, because their prose is naked and unapologetically so ... Despite the abstractness of the book’s major threads, much of the prose is grounded in observation ... orces us to pay attention to the things closest to us, whether it’s the relationships we have with each other or the relationships we have with art.
This is a slutty book, not just in content but in form. The long, sprawling essay bends prose and language to seek both intimacy and the alive body ... T brings us through lack by allowing separate threads of desire to intersect and interrupt each other. Each feeling of loss and desire brings us another. In this way, T creates a new sense of experiencing desire and time ... The transgender body knows that there is ultimately no end point or destination ... We’ve trained ourselves not to look back—or in any direction. But Fleischmann postures that turning toward the thing we desire at the risk of loss shows we are alive or, at the very least, honestly within a body.
