A brilliant book flowing the politics of process philosophy through all the other body politic. ‘No body is undisturbed’ (35). Life, that ‘place between’, both ‘invisible and everywhere’ (352). Microbiology and memory, Australia and China, this read chokes while offering fresh air.
Some books get you in with the first line. The fifth, sixth and seventh got me. ‘The only lasting truth/Is Change/God is Change ‘ (3) With the sweltering truth of the then that is now, Earthseed: a living bible for these times.
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A story of a snake spirit 16,000 years old, born into a body who lives in ways that only others such as she can understand. (226). The truth: ‘the child of Ala is not, and can never be, intended for your hands.’
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Uncomfortable increasingly less sat-upon Pew wonders ‘why it was that anyone believed the human body needed to be any particular way, or what was so important about a human body’ (116). Wise Pew refuses to think ‘other people’s dreams are boring’ (112).
A swarm around gravestones and archives in the dodgy company of the haunted Lincolns. A swimmy mess of historical confabulation that preys on fears and half-alive mythologies and propaganda. Voices of poetry and prosy, ghostly prodding and all this with terrifying wit.
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‘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.
’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.
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).
