‘The apartment had windows on all sides’ (1). Mothering under duress that presses through those windows and this life of a mother and toddler in a ‘two mat’ bedroom (16). Hard slaps, sleeping on a heartbeat, threaded with the shiver of dreams.
It’s all in the first epigraph. ‘”You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.” (Louise Bourgeois.) So many dream houses and (spoiler alert) only in the end, a dream home. Brilliant. It burns.
This work is a case of a worlding with every wording, where material textuality creates a poetic space for thick description that helps me see the world as textual material. A thing, the blue case, with a bare handle on itself, offers…
’Fear is the first lesson’ (71). This book rings with rational fright and pointed wit. The heart-breaking absurdity of choking climate extremity, legs nightmarishly unmoving. Women! Winnie! Get out of the pyre and run! My mother, discerning reader, will love this book.
Farming must fundamentally change over the next ten years, if humans are to flourish for future generations. Our species, like most other species in this world, thrive with nourishing food, fresh air and unpolluted water. For many decades, intensive farming has been …
Ideas of human superiority are embedded in the cultural model of dominion that patterns most human societies at this historical moment. This limited anthropocentric thinking has been instrumental in brutal injustices against animals of all species, humans included, especially over the past …
Germany, self-surveilling. ‘Must living in peace … result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?’ (241) Only with the men’s ‘survival’ will ‘Hitler truly have lost the war’ (50).
A thin strong book of the patriarchy’s work in bruises and lectures and going along. ‘No need to be rough, everyone knows what’s coming’ (1). And how feminisms resist in whispers and understandings and action. ‘I’m between you and everything else’ (149).
Deeply unsettling five years post-publication. Epidemics. Yep. Bangladesh in flood? An aid-worker friend has the pictures. The, the inwardness of childhood: ‘how much of their time is spent engaged with whatever it is that they’re doing, trying things out, becoming themselves’ (184).
Place, person, place as person, unplaced person, all opening in the line: ‘You were a girl, thin and young, with veins that showed blue’ (1). My/your/our past/place/person all ‘slipping and falling’ (304). Truth elides you/me/us all, ‘we can’t get to it’ (305).
