brice_mo's reviews
450 reviews

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!

Abi Maxwell’s One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman is a fiercely maternal book, albeit one that suggests the characteristics of a wonderfully protective mother make for a needlessly defensive memoir.

All memoir is myth. All memoir is mis-remembrance.

In the best memoirs, however, authors resist—or, at least, interrogate—their own impulse to bend history to their will. They use the form as an opportunity for reflection, revisiting complex experiences with the grace of hindsight. It becomes a site for self-critique as much as self-forgiveness.

Unfortunately, Abi Maxwell seems keen on sanding down every narrative edge, ensuring that she is unimpeachable at every turn and contorting the narrative into a feel-good story with all the sheen of a Netflix original. As a gift to her daughter, it works; as a book for wide readership, it does not.

The prose is as sweet as cough syrup, going down smoothly and progressively dulling the reader’s senses with the warmth of nostalgia—a foreknowledge that rings false. For example, when describing how her 4- or 5-year-old daughter wanted to wear pink shoes pre-transition, Maxwell writes, “we had raised a little feminist human, a child who understood in her bones that female did not equal less." It reads profoundly artificial and self-serving, less like a celebration of her daughter’s unmitigated enthusiasm and more as Maxwell's need to reify mainstream cultural constructions of gender by offering herself as their antithesis. Even in the book’s darkest moments, the author telegraphs her inevitable triumph in a way that betrays the emotional truth of the narrative, and this approach becomes a recurrent weakness.

If one boils the book down to its essence, its premise is “I’m an amazing ally.” After a point, the author’s righteous anger starts to feel like self-righteous posturing, simply because she’s so adamant about declaring it over and over. The emotional weight that might be felt in a short-form essay is lost through repetition. Furthermore, and I hesitate to say this because it’s such a damning critique, there are moments where both Maxwell’s daughter—and her gay brother, Noah—feel like props, as if their purpose is to showcase the author’s advocacy. We don’t get a sense of anyone’s personality in this book, which makes it feel like the author is more interested in LGBTQIA+ issues than LGBTQIA+ people.

It honestly made me squeamish.

It’s a shame because there’s clearly a story to be told here, and I think a book like this could be really encouraging to parents in a similar situation. In fact, I understand and sympathize with why Maxwell frames the story the way she does—she is rightfully protective of her daughter, but I’m not sure we can protect ourselves from history in the way she attempts. Memoir must wrestle with all of it.

Based on other reviews, I’m clearly in the minority opinion, so I hope One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman offers something of substance to its readers; I just wonder if its palatability does more harm than good.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC!

Though marketed as a memoir, Bethany Joy Lenz’s thoughtfully restrained Dinner for Vampires is perhaps more accurately described as a testimony. It’s jarring, specific, and boldly redemptive in its willingness to interrogate religious language without dismissing it entirely.

Full disclosure—I haven’t seen any of One Tree Hill. In fact, my only exposure to Bethany Joy Lenz’s work is Psalty the singing hymnbook, a horrifying Christian cryptid I don’t recommend googling before bed. Truthfully, the book seems likely to resonate more with people who are in a similar boat; if you're an OTH superfan, you might be disappointed by how absent the show is here.

Throughout the book, Lenz details the way her involvement in a house church shifted from an exciting alternative to mainstream Christian culture to a more pervasive and perverse part of her life. “I Escaped A Cult” books are a dime-a-dozen, but Dinner for Vampires is distinct from its peers in that Lenz has a genuine desire to believe the best, leading her to earnestly ask questions and dissect the cult’s beliefs and language. Where many books of this ilk demand that readers assume someone would be “crazy” for getting involved, Lenz’s vulnerability invites readers to experience the discomfort of feeling “crazy” for assuming that something is actually wrong.

The muted approach makes for a less splashy book, but it’s one that arguably reflects the reality of religious trauma more accurately. So much of the spiritual, psychological, and emotional abuse depicted occurs within the space of plausible deniability. Lenz expertly describes behaviors that seem just a few degrees shy of innocuous—the kind of off-kilter actions that summon a pit in your stomach before you quickly tamp it down out of fear. To anybody who has moved through evangelical circles, it will feel all too familiar when the author notes the way “repentance” allowed cult members to shirk personal accountability, or how skin-crawlingly recognizable phrases like “guard your heart” and “love on people” are used to exert control.

Suffice it to say, Dinner for Vampires is an exceptionally meaningful book, and not merely another glossy celebrity memoir. Regardless of readers’ religious background, Bethany Joy Lenz has crafted a a grace-filled opportunity for all of us to reflect on how the language of freedom can so easily be abused, and how true freedom is often found in people being there to pull us out.

Thanks to NetGalley and Querencia Press for the ARC!

Cheryl Tan’s goddess is a slight but sturdy chapbook—a sorbet, of sorts, that whets the appetite just enough for the reader to want more.

I remember reading an interview once where a Singaporean artist spoke about how the physical constraint of the island lent itself to art that was expansive and experimental. This idea resonates with goddess.

It’s a bit difficult to find a center in such a brief chapbook, but it still pulls the reader into its orbit. Tan addresses sexuality, religion, and language, but she handles each subject with such a light touch that they seem almost feather-light. It feels like these poems need the context of a full collection in order for them to land with the force that moves just beneath their surface. They seem to desire conversation with each other, but Tan withholds it. The tension is wonderful.

“Padma” and “Fragments” are standout poems, but the line that burrowed into my brain originates in “honorary hollowscape”:

“can you count down to the moments when memory turns diegetic, the forcing of marrow of bone, ash out of body?”

I mean, wow.

Thanks to NetGalley and Atria for the ARC!

Throughout Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth, the speaker leads readers through a range of emotional geographies, gradually terraforming the titular landscape from a site of devastation to one of preparation—in the same way that a fire may ready a field for the next season’s harvest.

It’s a breathless, wondrous collection of poems about the ferocity of Black, queer joy, and it’s immediately memorable for the strength of Clark’s voice.

Poems are often defined by a restrictive economy of language—a compulsion to remove everything absolutely unnecessary. Clark never does that, instead shaping the collection with opulent, celebratory, rambling language. It’s not chaotic, but rather evidence for how deeply we need language that is impractical—words that "accomplish" nothing.

Within the speaker’s world, it feels like the only language strong enough to hold all of life’s experiences is the language that wasn’t designed to do so. Clark dispenses with the precise and cold lexicon we use to distance ourselves from the world, and, in its stead, she playfully experiments with whatever will pull it closer. There’s a noted kinship here with Ross Gay’s work, and Clark’s self-identified “transgressive joy” will resonate with anyone who has read Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude or either Book of Delights. Simply put, the speaker writes as if true, muscular joy must be strong enough to embrace grief and hold it close.

As such, this is not a fluffy collection by any means. There’s some heavy content relating to divorce, racism, and sexuality, but it all seems rooted in the speaker’s refusal to allow the world to harden her. Its feels bold in its tenderness, particularly toward the speaker herself; each piece reads like a step closer to catharsis.

Poetry is an acquired taste, often to its detriment—reading a poem often only encourages the reader to read another poem. That isn’t the case here. Clark instead welcomes readers to reflect on their taste, sometimes interrogating poetry as a genre, and sometimes literally describing, well, taste. For example, in “After the Reading,” we see euphoric, sensorial descriptions of pulled pork and Diet Coke thrown into contrast with the interruptions of emotional abstraction. It is as if life’s “basest” pleasures offer the form that its complications resist. We must ask if we have cultivated the right appetites.

Scorched Earth is a collection I’m excited to revisit, and Tiana Clark’s work here is beautiful in how it invites readers to sit in a poem, take all the time they need, and—when they are ready—move more deeply into the world.

Thanks to NetGalley and Roxane Gay Books for the ARC!

Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a reflective and effective memoir on the author’s journey from cishet-presenting housewife to lesbian to trans man. It’s a complicated story in the simplest of terms, and that is its greatest strength.

Radclyffe resists so many memoirish tropes, avoiding existential drama in favor of experiential detail. He is less concerned with the hand-wringing of becoming a capital-S “Self” and more preoccupied with the handholding people need to be themselves. The book is richly shaded by his excellent ability to depict mundane anxieties—Is the Amazon algorithm going to be overtly queer if he searches for lesbian books? Or, as his parents wonder, Will he be sent to a men’s prison if he’s arrested post-transition?

There are, of course, some complex themes, such as reflections on what it means to be a man—the distinction between violence and strength, and what it means to choose gentleness in the face of that ambiguity. Similarly, Radclyffe’s descriptions of dysphoria are really effective, focusing primarily on simple physicality and the discomfort of phantom limb sensations.

I suspect the writing style found in Frighten the Horses will be divisive. Radclyffe’s prose is characterized by the same kind of solid, workmanlike masculinity that he seeks to embody throughout his life, which makes the writing both approachable and—perhaps to its detriment—unaffected. Gender and sexual identity are often such volatile topics, particularly in memoir, so there’s something entrancing about the author’s pragmatic, almost methodical, journey to understanding himself, even if it precludes dramatic narrative turns.

Most admirably, this is just such a generous book. I think memoirs often depict an untouchable narrator, steamrolling the people around them to discover their truest self, but Radclyffe never does that. He never demonizes anybody, and he’s very compassionate in his understanding of the cost of coming out. For example, he’s forthright about his ex-husband’s cruelty, but he also seems attuned to the insecurities that animate it. Elsewhere, we read some very pointed and painful conversations, but there’s rarely—if ever—a dichotomy between who is “right” and who is “wrong.” Instead, the author gracefully depicts these moments as unfortunate timing—a shame that this is where these lives intersect. So many memoirs fail from a lack of perspective, but Radclyffe brings it in spades.

I have a feeling Frighten the Horses will fly under the radar, but Oliver Radclyffe has written a memoir that will resonate with the readers who find it, and I hope it signals an authorial future filled with many more books.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press for the ARC!

Will Self’s Elaine is a colossal and forceful misstep—a textbook example of authorial self-indulgence that seems to loathe both its subject and its audience. It's one of the rare pieces of writing where I can't find anything good to say about it.

In this “auto-oedipal fiction” (okay, gag), Self draws from his mother’s private diaries to craft a story about sexual frustration in the life of a 1950s housewife. It’s definitely a worthy subject for a novel, but its execution is egregious.

Any book written by a man “from a woman’s perspective” should cause the reader to pause, but this spirals immediately into bad taste, showcasing a protagonist that only avoids being a manic pixie dream girl by aging out of it. Self replaces that trope’s fixation on effortless cool with an insistence that women actually can be pretty deep. Elaineargues for female complexity with such fervor that it becomes reductionist—the author seemingly needs the titular character to earn readers’ respect, rather than just assuming she deserves it. This gets even grosser when one considers that at least some of the novel’s thoughts originate from the author’s mother, yet he feels entitled to mediate them through his own lens and for his own purposes.

Furthermore, the prose is insufferable. Elaine is one of the most grating, overwrought things I’ve read in a while, and I say that as someone who loves writing that flirts with the poetic. I love elevated language. I love academic opaqueness. I love when I need to look up a word. The problem is that Self wields his lexicon like a blunt instrument, forcibly bludgeoning the reader in almost every line. As an example, consider this early sentence:

“Despite the tubular dress and the lampshade coiffure, young Genevieve appeared simultaneously gamine, nubile . . . and intelligent.”

Aside from the fact that the word “nubile” should be placed on the literary equivalent of a no-fly list, this sentence also reflects how Self’s writing style never finds a rhythm that balances its dense peaks with approachable valleys. It’s always turned to 11 and often incomprehensible in its desperation to sound bookish—the print equivalent of a podcast bro.

By the end of Elaine, I just wasn't sure of who was meant to read the book other than its author, and I think that's a problem. 

Good writing may start for oneself, but I'm not sure it can successfully end there.

Thanks to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC!

Marianne Brooker’s Intervals is a marvel—a messy-by-necessity extended meditation on grief and what it means to live and die in a capitalist world.

If that sounds sterile, a quick glance at the book’s premise will dispel that impression. The author's mother was diagnosed with MS and eventually chose to refuse food and drink. How does one begin to understand the end of a life?

As Brooker acknowledges, end-of-life choice is often framed as a moral binary, but she’s quick to point out that such an attitude is inadequate for all of the decisions that nuance grief. Palliative care demands a better understanding of care itself. As the author writes, “Care is its neighbour, love, made solid.”

The question, then, is what it means to love somebody who is leaving.

In response, Brooker offers the idea of “intervals” as a contrast to “interventions.” Rather than stepping in, care involves stepping back to create shared space. This concept sustains the book, scaffolding an autotheory approach reminiscent of writers like Christina Sharpe—a scholar referenced repeatedly here. Unsurprisingly, it can all be a bit heady, but it’s impossible to reduce the book to one thing.

Intervals is tonally cacophonous, moving abruptly from heartfelt grief to detached theorizing to bemused reflection. It can be a little jarring, but I found that it effectively amplifies the confusion of loss. A discussion on healthcare access might suddenly be bifurcated by an anecdote on the mother’s baffling decision to buy a lottery ticket with foreknowledge of her death. We can almost feel Brooker struggling in real time to make sense of the situation, but commendably, she never succumbs to platitudes or the impulse to turn her mother into an object lesson.

The book is, however, deeply situated but unsettled in political realities. There’s a lot here about how death is discursively constructed and financially constrained by those with power, and it feels like an important conversation to have. Dying might be a universal experience, but we’re awfully reluctant to talk about how to go through it better—more thoughtfully, more companionably. And, more importantly, we’re too resistant to creating a world that prevents early death by shifting away from a focus on the body’s utility.

There are no easy answers to the questions Marianne Brooker thoughtfully poses in Intervals, but she offers a simple encouragement:

“If this book is an attempt at saying anything at all, it is to insist we keep trying.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!

Cynthia Zarin’s Next Day is a collection of poems culled from an entire career, which makes it more successful as a reflection of its author than as a body of work.

Broadly speaking, these are poems with gradual rotations rather than turns. There aren’t many memorable lines or unexpected images. They are decorated with so many natural objects that they can start to feel garish, like an antique shop without a curatorial hand—a toybox emptied onto the floor. In the late career books represented here, this approach works well, taking on an almost I Spy effect, though the same cannot be said for the earlier poems.

Readers’ enjoyment will depend entirely on their personal poetics. Zarin seems to prioritize form, crafting intricate and precise pieces that—for me—are easier to appraise than they are to appreciate. Unfortunately, it often feels like someone showing you the gears behind a clock face when you asked for the time. There’s a perpetually heightened register and emotional detachment that seems determined to convince readers that these are, in fact, capital-P "Poems."

It’s clear this is an aesthetic decision rather than a question of ability because there are beautiful exceptions, particularly in The Ada Poems and Orbit. These books feel like a better balance between Zarin’s stylistic preoccupations and substantive themes, and I wish I had encountered them without the burden of the surrounding anthology.

Ultimately, Next Day feels like a bit of an anachronism—a product of an era that celebrated the artist’s mystique. These poems often obscure the speaker to the point of anonymity, and for readers who favor transparency and creative risks, there are much more interesting books to read.

Thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company for the ARC!

Katherine Packert Burke’s Still Life is a solid debut novel with ambitions that occasionally feel lost amidst other narrative distractions.

Still Life is the story of a trans woman—Edith—trying to unify her life’s “before” and “after”—the years pre- and post-transition. Her pre-transition life is filled with friendships, romances, and formative moments, but how does one honor what was intentionally left behind? How do those feelings, relationships, and events change when they’ve been re-mediated through a changed body?

There are incredible moments where the instability of identity compounds the already-difficult realities of relationship—scenes in which we see the impossibility of tidy emotional categorization. Thematically this suggests an interesting exploration of the latent ambiguities of found-family intimacy, especially the permeable borders between platonic and romantic love. One can’t help but applaud Burke’s ability and willingness to sustain this tension across the entirety of the book.

The question, however, is whether this tension can sustain the entirety of a book.

I’m not so sure.

All the shared histories and inside jokes feel real, but unfortunately so—they ring as factual but untrue, the kind of anecdotes that would be met with blank, disinterested stares if you told them to acquaintances. They seem excised from an actual life and clumsily grafted in here, and it leads to many uncomfortable moments in which the reader wonders if Burke is simply including details from her own life to fill out the story.

Similarly, Still Life isn’t a long book, but it overstays its welcome by a good hundred pages, largely due to how often Burke diverts her attention from emotional complexity and devotes it to the self-absorbed petulance of academia. Much of the book waxes intellectual in a way that would feel meaningful in a graduate seminar, but it’s absurd, esoteric, and self-indulgent in any other medium. I suspect that readers’ enjoyment will depend on whether academia is a shared experience—it’s so estranging otherwise, and I say that as someone who loved my graduate seminars. Each time I found myself excited by mention of, say, a literary theorist, it also felt like an obvious detriment to the narrative.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how much these critiques matter because Burke’s prose is excellent. Even when the story seems to be fraying at its seams, it’s held together by her truly remarkable descriptive language. There are moments that are so emotionally specific or visually singular that I found myself re-reading them—flirtations with poetry. This is an author who knows the strengths of her voice; she just might need a little more time refining them.

Still Life never quite works on its own merits, but it does feel like a preview of an exciting literary career. Katherine Packert Burke’s meticulous attention to every word is magnetic, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Perennial for the ARC!

Who do you picture when you hear the word “undocumented”?

You shouldn’t have an image in mind, but you probably do, and The Undocupoets’ brilliantly anthologized Here to Stay will gently but willfully complicate it at every turn, resisting the border-shaped erasure created by political discourse.

The range in themes, styles, and subject matter in this anthology serves as a necessary contrast to this kind of reductionism. Some of these pieces are formally adventurous, whereas others find their shape within the constraints of conformity. In much the same way, some of these fifty-two writers favor a dissolution of borders entirely, while others simply crave assimilation through legal status. Each poet prefaces their work with an artist’s statement, and many of these moved me to tears while also offering aesthetic context.

Hermelinda Hernandez writes about “the cold grammar of immigrant linguistics” and the dehumanizing force of government documentation.

Jan-Henry Gray describes undocumented writing as “an act of forging (something new, one hopes) and a kind of forgery.”

Elmo Tumbokon articulates the tension implicit in representation—that visibility politics is a threat: “To confess my being is to risk my safety.”

What’s most striking about the collection is how rarely these poets choose to strike back. Immigration law is codified violence, and one might expect a series of fiery poems, raging against the machine. Some of those are present here, to be sure, but so many of these pieces seem to view a radical gentleness as the only way forward.

For example, Laurel Chen’s “Greensickness” is the kind of gorgeous that makes your ribcage collapse—“Let me be lawless and beloved.”

Similarly, in “The poem where ants are immigrants and I am the U.S.,” Jorge Quintana writes, “I pray that their next lives / are filled with less mercy / and more sovereignty.”

Poems like this are inarguable. They defy response (except, perhaps, for tears). They are political statements that subvert the language of power. They don’t fit into the categories prescribed by either side of the political spectrum. They can only be accepted.

I think Jane Kuo says it most clearly in her statement of poetics, inviting readers into discomfort: “My poems present the reader with a choice: come here and sit with me or choose not to be implicated, to remain on the outside, eavesdropping.”

It's such a privilege to sit with all of these poets and their art.