A fictionalized memoir set in an alternate 1999. Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.
In Tea’s hands, sobriety, love and something like happiness are stranger and more unsettling than bohemian decadence could ever hope to be ... Black Wave retains the off-kilter realism of the best apocalyptic writing: The nightmare is like our world, only a little more so.
...a startling, engaging, and incisive novel ... The experience of reading Black Wave is immersive and eerie, a version of our own world that feels abruptly and dangerously close to home in its coast toward oblivion. It’s a fantastic mélange of tropes and techniques ... Plus, again: the prose is fucking gorgeous, the characters are hilarious and upsetting and miserable, the world is heart-stopping in its strangeness and bleak crawl to the edge of the cliff, then its tumble over the edge.
Tea's book plants a flag by vigorously continuing the legacies of feminist writers like Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, and Audre Lorde ... both a sprawling ode to the people who have filled Tea's life as a poet and LGBT activist, and an earnest introspection on writing, addiction, love, and political violence ... Tea harnesses the tension born of the book's hybrid form to offer candid, even analytical, meditations on what life as a queer artist can be like ... the shift toward the apocalypse can feel abrupt, distracting from the myriad and rich lives Tea has already painted so well ... Black Wave is a testament to the power that opens up when a writer dismantles the rigid borders of social hierarchies, and of genre.
