le_lobey's reviews
341 reviews

This was a challenging read for me, but interesting. I think that the collection as a whole succeeds more than any of the individual poems. As a whole there is a clear constellation of themes that tie the poems together, though it didn't feel like most of them had a clear position on those themes. Rather they gestured at one, or several, of those overarching ideas while playing with language or telling part of the story. I guess each poem felt more like a part of its section rather than a complete work in itself, and I didn't enjoy that. I think this comments more on my taste as a reader of poetry than on the quality of the collection however.

Of the 3 major sections, I liked Shangdu, my Artful Boomtown! the best. It had the most cohesive individual poems, and a really strong setting. I also really liked how Hong featured assonance and alliteration to create a strong rhythm in these poems. Aubade is a great example.

Complicated thoughts. I can't really rate this iwithout knowing more.

The story was exciting and adventurous. I love the worldbuilding, and the characters are really vibrant and well imagined. The climax and denouement were insanely thrilling.

For the most part I really liked the details in the prose and thought the pacing was great, particularly in the back half. I find the way Ruocchio writes Hadrian to be really grating sometimes. I literally groaned through the sequence where they approached

Vorgossos

— the prose was asphyxiatingly purple, and he capped it off with an on the nose Shelley reference that made me cringe. I know it's a creative choice, because the style was so different in the novella from Crispin's POV. It just doesn't land for me when it's at its most excessive.

What makes me more conflicted about this book is the way the text handles one of its main themes: delineating the boundaries of self and what counts as human. The main conflict informing this theme is obviously Human vs Cielcin, and Tanaran complicates any easy answers with its intelligence and comportment. The first half of the book sees Hadrian and co. travelling among Extrasolarians, whose mores regarding transhumanism and genetic engineering are markedly less restrictive than in the core of the empire. This makes sense, but Hadrian desperately holds on to his society's taboos in ways that made me really uncomfortable.

The fact of the matter is that Hadrian equates his humanity and selfhood with his blood — his biology and his genetics. Using samples of his blood as a bargaining chip is completely off the table for him because he pales to imagine a part of himself being used to produce genetic chimeras. He sees these homunculi as wholly separate from, and less than, humanity. He feels the same way about the Exalted, a group of extrasolarians whose widespread technological body-modding he finds repulsive and horrifying because of the exotic shapes they create for themselves. Hadrian himself is deeply upset at the end of the book that

the bones of his left arm are replaced with metal.

He's not himself anymore. The persistent equating of selfhood, genetics, and biological form read as fundamentally transphobic to me. And since the book's narrative framing device positions Hadrian as the author, I can't tell if those opinions are meant to be the character's or the author's. The dog whistles are loud, and last for hundreds of pages.

I enjoy the world enough to give the series one more try. I hope that these opinions are artifacts of Hadrian's status as an anti-hero, and that as he processes what happened to him in this book he'll come to question and move past these immature and reactionary views. If it turns out that the vitriol is Ruocchio's and he's letting it bleed through I'll have to abandon these books.

An incredibly unique and rewarding reading experience. The Bible meets National Geographic photojournalism meets 80s slasher flick all in the guise of an anti-Western nightmare. Everything was hyper-saturated. Some of the most beautiful and horrifying prose I have ever read.

Judge Holden is a twisted Nietzschean

Purchased at Strand, read with a Center for Fiction group.

This is the first Bolaño I've read. Ben McFall recommended him to me years ago on a shift, and I after reading this I'm really excited to try more. Ben hit the nail on the head. The prose was so rich with detail without ever letting the pace falter. It reminded me of Mann. I really enjoyed the humor and conversational tone as well. He deftly jumps between the lives of different characters, blending history, travelogue, lit crit, and gossip session all in one, until you find yourself gripped in a noir thriller.

The only thing holding me personally back from 5 stars on this is my lack of a background in the personalities of Chilean literature. I simply don't know if these people were real, fictional, or satiric so I imagine there are layers to this that I wasn't able to appreciate. But I loved what I got!

 Borrowed from BPL

This was ok. Written fairly well, but I really didn't care for the pig latin variant the twins used to talk to one another -- or that Kahler felt the need to translate it each time, even though we'd long learned to read it.

A lot of the action in the first half wasn't particularly gripping for me, and I think in many cases was only inserted to pay off later revelations. I guess it felt like it was written back to front. She goes to back room poker games because

that's how they used evangelize for the Plan

. How'd she end up at the game though? Well I guess we'll give her a love interest that will

enable her sister's later betrayal

.

At Violet's behest I guess?

Because so much of the first act came off as inconsequential I really struggled to get into the book. It was a lot more interesting once

the cult stuff

entered the picture. 

Read this for the One Book One School program at work. It was pretty good! Polished it off on the train to church. I Didn't know the particular history of segregated pools and beaches that stymied the transfer of swimming skills to black children in mid-century America. Positive messaging about perseverance and teamwork, repairing broken friendships.

This project is rather different from Soft Science, which made me fall in love with Choi's work. I still really enjoyed it, particularly all of the playing with tense in the first section (Grief Is a Thing with Tense Issues), and the poem "How to Let Go Of the World" really blew me away. I loved how each of the vignettes at the beginning grew into one another. It was very affecting.

I also liked the sequence of poems "Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters As Cooking Fuel." Other standouts include:

I learned that I was Beautiful
Unlove Poem
Prayer for the Untranslated Testimony
Wildlife
Demilitarized Zone

I didn't love all of the list poems. The part of this collection that highlights movement through time and intergenerational identification was wonderful, but didn't blow my mind as it would have if I hadn't read Richard Powers and Moore's Jerusalem. Can't fault her for it, it just made those bits less affecting for me.

I really enjoyed act II, but the beginning and ending didn't resonate with me as much. The prose is beautiful throughout, but a lot of the Cyrus-Zee dialogue felt saccharine, and a few scenes didn't really fall into place. The surreal ending also took me by surprise, and I don't really care for books that cheekily insert Donald Trump. It comes off very Dante's Inferno.

In the last section of this collection, also called Separations, Hacker presents a set of 18 sonnets. The sixth begins, 

These poems really sang when they were strictly confined in forms and rhymes. Those aspects helped anchor me in the work and meaning, whereas I found myself unmoored in poems with more abstract subjects and which more freely moved between scenes and characters. The poems I found most accessible were ones about broken/breaking relationships.

My favorites were:

Somewhere in a turret
Sonnet
Geode
Villanelle: Late Summer
Gifts
Separations: XII

I also really liked Prism and Lens, from which:

Really wonderful piece of work. Nowadays Nietzsche's reputation precedes him, but this biography does a great job of explaining the ideas and introducing the man and his struggle for renown and with chronic illness. I'm amazed how little I knew about the closeness of Nietzsche and Wagner in his early life, and understanding his philosophy more makes me want to revisit Thomas Mann. I think Death in Venice will make a lot more sense to me now that I can appreciate the Appolonian/Dionysian dichotomy. I can only imagine how The Magic Mountain might seem in this new light.

Prideaux is very concerned with separating the myths from the man. She spends a lot of effort extricating N's memory and philosophy from his sister Elizabeth's curatorship at the tragic end of his life, and the legacy of Nazism to which she selfishly and inaccurately fed his work. Prideaux makes a very clear case that Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism and saw himself as more of a stateless cosmopolitan than as a German. She does not shy away from his misogyny, and explores how the frustration in his personal relationships fueled this.

It was good to become better acquainted with the ideas of the Will to Power and Death of God. I like the interpretation of the Will to Power as really an atavistic life force. But what really gripped me was the exploration of eternal recurrence and Amor fati. I'd always interpreted eternal recurrence as a sort of cosmic-horrific doom, and not as a test. I'm not sure what to make of the idea that what makes an Ubermensch is the ability to assimilate and accept all of their experience. To look upon everything and be able to say I'm ok with this because it is the direct result of my desire and will. I find myself pushing back against the idea, but it feels so joyous — and today, improbable? I need to sit more with it and think through. Excited to read Deleuze's book on him now.