le_lobey's reviews
343 reviews

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.

This didn't work as well for me as Mountain in the Sea. It felt like there were too many characters to keep track of for the shorter length, both POV characters and otherwise. I think a slightly shorter story that more deeply inhabited Damira's perspectives would have been more effective, and maybe combining the characters of Vladimir and Svyataslov somehow. I'm not sure I needed both.

Wow! This floored me. As I was reading I didn’t quite see where it was going. I knew that people generally categorize this as "philosophical" sci-fi, and I just wasn't really getting that. In retrospect, I think that's because the prose is so suited to the characters and the story. The ending was so moving, and fully recontextualized the novel to help me see how well structured it is. I can't wait to reread this, I feel like I'll enjoy it even more.

Really beautiful and moving story about family, identity, and belonging. I particularly appreciated how cultural artifacts of all sorts were used through the book to construct memories, identities, and community. 

Elhillo richly describes food, clothing, music, and dance. The sensuousness of the language was a real strong suit. I haven't read many novels in verse, so I don't know how this compares with others in the genre, but the text seemed to favor the novelistic over the poetic. It was almost prose-like, though maybe I wasn't attuned to rhythmic aspects. Elhillo does slam poetry, and I tried to read with pauses inserted where there were breaks in the text, but I often found myself reading through the chapters as if they were sentences in a prose text and had no issue. I'd love to read some of her poetry to see if/how it differs.

The writing is hard, and spare. Deeply poetic in style, with moments of crystalline beauty peeking out, sifted from the brutality. The boy and the man are great and meaningful characters. I particularly like their encounter with the cryptic old man Ely, and the image of the brook trout in the mountains. Very moving

Emotional and endearing. As good as I could have hoped for a YA title, if not better. The first person narration didn't bother me in the slightest — I actually ripped through this in one sitting while a flight was delayed.

The best parts were Ari's family healing from their traumas, getting to watch them grow together and support one another. It felt very honest and real. The romance was deftly handled too, after maybe a slightly rushed open.

*Borrowed from Ms Rafferty's classroom*

I really enjoyed this story. The writing was more consistent than in Empire of Silence, and it was good to explore Crispin's inner world. It definitely benefitted his character — we could still see his headstrong and less analytical tendencies without the lens of Hadrian's disdain. It was also nice to get the reflective tone of the full novel without Hadrian's sadboi nonsense. 

I didn't at all expect the enclave of Catholics. It was an interesting piece of worldbuilding that I enjoyed.

*Borrowed from Brooklyn Public Library Storage*

This was a really interesting collection of poems. I'm not sure I truly understood most of them, as they're very wrapped up in the cosmology and rituals of the Ewe people. I just don't know anything about that, and often felt like there was a wall I couldn't climb to really dig into the poems. I could appreciate the way Awoonor's is memorializing, grieving for that culture. These poems are very elegiac, even psalm-like. It made me think about myth-making and how true this dream of a re-imagined Ewe culture really was. 

The vast majority of the poems are highly oratorical and ritualistic. Beseeching a god, ancestor, or "true" Ewe cultural inheritors to forgive the people for forgetting their roots. He pays a lot of attention to the materials of the culture, and I did enjoy how musically the sounds of the word were put together at times. I think it was part of how the poems were imagined as spoken/sung cultural artifacts. The writing was really good and I learned a fair bit about recent Ghanaian history from the introduction and many of the poems. But since they were all drawing on such foreign metaphors and traditions, I felt like I could only really appreciate the mood; the content was inaccessible to me. Reminded me of trying to play saxophone (I'm a flutist).

There were a few that I really liked. "I heard a Bird Cry" still operates in that elegiac mode, but it's much longer than the other poems, and Awoonor creates a fairly dense symbolic net through the poem where images keep cropping up and drawing you back to previous stanzas. His character is also different in this poem. It felt like a homeless prophet raving to a crowd of bypassers. The frantic, frenetic energy of it was a welcome break from the grief even while many of the images were similar.

The other that I connected to was "Hymn to My Dumb Earth." Here we see Awoonor as a global citizen, not just as scion of a lost culture he wants to reclaim. It's really the only poem in the book written intentionally from this perspective, and the style was remarkably different. Really modern, and drawing on lots of cultural symbols that I could actually use! Jazz, Christianity, Marxism, western geography, western literary references, etc. Interestingly, this poem was also seeded with references to many of the other poems in the collection. Knowing that Awoonor can also write like this makes me wish that I could truly understand the other poems. It was humbling to be so thoroughly confronted by the limits of my own perspective.

There were really only 2 poems that I felt I really connected with in this collection, and that's why I'm rating it a 3 and not higher. For a more educated reader, I'm sure this collection could be a more rewarding experience. 

Incredible art, stories inconsistent. I liked the beginning a lot more than the final arc, though the reveal in the final chapters was effective.

Very Lovecraft

I really enjoy the format of episodic short horror fiction set in a consistent world. A rotating cast of characters let's you show how terror/hauntings manifests in different ways without having to keep a protagonist around to see the end. It can be more horrifying, the characters more helpless. And you can slowly introduce elements that connect events which build a sense of overwhelming odds in the reader. The best of the stories in Uzumaki did that.

Other elements successfully evoked profound discomfort.

Body horror/transmogrification/cannibalism

These aren't my preferred style of horror media, but I guess there need to be stakes? And it made for highly imaginative and expressive illustrations.