A memoir, yes, though one could more aptly describe it as a memoir exploded ... Resists the kind of scriptotherapeutic writing that attempts to lead its author towards catharsis, or something akin to closure. What LaBarge offers instead is a strikingly polyphonic scattering of traumatic, fragmented experiences, both psychological and physical ... For those seeking a temporally lucid narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end, Dog Days is best to be avoided ... A pleasurably disorienting document of survival.
A strange and stunning book ... Expansive ... Braiding memoir with criticism, psychoanalysis with poetry, fiction and even quantum physics. It’s a testament to LaBarge’s gifts as a writer that she can make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive.
In a restless and kaleidoscopic collage of life writing, art criticism, and psychoanalytic and affect theory, Dog Days is LaBarge’s reckoning with (or attempt to expel) this It, the 'incandescent voltage' of trauma ... Offers little in the way of edification or tidy resolution ... A more conventional tale of violence or suffering or addiction might seduce its reader with the utopian promise of repair ... A peculiar, energizing archaeology of violence throughout and is at its most revolutionary when digging into the relational pleasures and griefs of confessional writing.
