The work of co-living coded in this writing’s ethic. Reminder. One’s child is ‘just another human animal, no more or less worthy than any others’. And a finding. Babies might forget excellent cuddles but are traumatised when not cuddled ‘well enough’ (Winnicot).
Hot pink writing, not so black and white
Dreamy Jimmy keeps pace with a rescued greyhound, becomes the ‘lithe body of a river’, enters the ‘golden lights’ of a grotto, raps out his life with Run DMC (285). The wisdom of Gabe. People can change if ‘life lets them’ (267).
Humans getting over themselves, entering the flow that was always-already there. Wandering and wondering with all the other nomads. Forget human norms, all that ‘normality, normalcy, and normativity’ (26). Death embraced for its ‘radical immanence’ (136). Time now for ‘transformative becoming’ (165).
Precise muscled writing, a tearing arc of pain that gathers in my own. Emotion, perfectly wrought. This symphony of long-held grief for the departure of loved ones is a reminder, jagged as a hacksaw, that those embedded in my heart never leave.
A reader buddy called it an epic as a slur. To my reading, this book is epic in the modern sense, despite its spirit of respect for the elders. Heads roll, guns fire, love conquers, vengeance is had and life goes on.
Righteous anger tearing up the e-page. Teenage heroics on top of surviving. Respect. This is fiction, a Mississippi girl telling a New York story, but it reads truer than the news. Hardcopy ordered for a mid-teen change agent close to my heart.
THUG LIFE …. the hate u give infants [or youth or anyone] f***** everybody
Loving this until a student reminds me there are better ways of dealing with a loved one’s brain-shift into a different person. Not repayments, re-shaping love. The other students feel her pain, we all say amen. Again, I learn more than teach.
Got me wondering. I mean, who owns what part of this story? That scholarship fund best be getting the proceeds or I’ve been consuming ill-gotten gains. Oh, those cells you’ve donated or had tested? No longer yours. You too could be immortal.
Detail from the Henrietta Lacks Foundation website
More questions than answers. What’s a ‘fern-harvest’? Are wasps ‘impudent’ or privileged? Does kneeling together really do ‘no harm’? How to wear ‘pomegranate flowers’? And when (at last) might we listen alertly to speeches on ‘capital and labour and labour and capital’?
Nails, like me/us, sullied with scrabbling from those ‘dank and wretched’ (17) ditches that life creates. The expressiveness of jam stains, soaring shifts in syntax. I am the protagonist’s friend, I put my loving hand on this book, declare myself ‘ensorcelled’ (151).
Beautiful. But it’s the matter under the surface that’s sublime
