brice_mo's reviews
450 reviews

Thanks to NetGalley and Tin House Press for the ARC!

Brittany Rogers’s Good Dress is a wonderful debut collection, sustained by the feeling of end-of-summer reflection—those final days where one is uncertain whether the sun will sweeten or sour memory.

There’s a lot to admire here, particularly because Rogers covers so much thematic ground without the book ever feeling unfocused. Broadly speaking, each of the themes touch on a coming-of-age experience, but they coalesce because the writing seems so rightfully self-assured. We see nostalgia without cliché, and it’s immensely satisfying to follow a speaker who is in the pocket, simultaneously feeling herself while grieving what it took to get to that point.

Poems often live or die based on their turns, and Rogers maintains such enigmatic precision in how she does so, both stylistically and thematically. She clearly has a well-honed skill and a gift, and it feels almost mysterious to watch her pull so many disparate elements into conversation. She dances between archaic forms and register and hip-hop-tinged looseness, and she pivots effortlessly between sensorial descriptions of food and existential abstractions. These are poems that make you want to eat at a cookout before suddenly satiating that hunger with symbolic meaning.

I suspect different readers will gravitate toward different parts of the book, but I love the poems that wrestle with the distance between a public, documented self and a private self. Through repeated interludes from the Detroit Public Library—like an explanation of debt—or therapy-related documentation like “Intake Form,” the speaker presses against the constraints of “official” language, often allowing readers to see the space between a factual explanation and a truthful explanation. To me, these poems encapsulate the book's core.

Good Dress is so thoughtful about the ways society tries to simplify Black women, and Rogers offer the counterpoint of complexity at every turn.

Annie Bot is a sci-fi novel that is brave enough to ask a novel question—“What if sexism were real?”

I kid, I kid. (But only a little.)

Unfortunately, this book is deeply informed by the Black Mirror school of social commentary, which is to say that there’s very little substance, but the glossy sheen of its sci-fi veneer might lead one to believe otherwise. This is a story that doesn’t have any concept of female agency apart from its abuse.

Annie never acts; she only reacts.

There’s probably a version of this book that could actually do something with that premise, but Sierra Greer writes like it’s enough to just point at emotional abuse—not with the conviction that it’s important to name it, but with the self-congratulatory certainty that nobody else has noticed it’s a problem. I think this approach plays into a dangerous cultural trend of misidentifying acknowledgment as empowerment, and ultimately, the author’s absolute fixation on male toxicity without a meaningful counterpoint actually erases the book’s protagonist.

Annie only self-actualizes through her abuse, and I think that communicates a really dangerous message.

Worse still, I think the author often tries to have her cake and eat it too, reveling in the violence of her depictions. Certain scenes waver between bodice-ripping erotica and, “Yeah, this is abuse,” but not in a way that seems intentionally ambiguous. It feels more like Greer wanted to write “spicy” scenes without being judged for their implications.

It's pretty irresponsible.

I don’t expect Greer to lecture readers, and I don’t think harsh content is a problem—it’s possible for a character to be disrespected within a book while being respected by an author. I just think that real world horrors deserve more than tepid “girlboss” moments, and Annie Bot does little more than aestheticize abuse in a way that suggests a perverse detachment from its realities. 

This whole thing is just sickeningly regressive.

Ugh.

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC!

Matthew Zapruder’s I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a warm, insulated collection of poems, often feeling like a shield between the reader and the world.

Many of these poems feel like the parts of bedtime stories that gnaw at the edges of dreams—the final sentences one hears before falling asleep. In other words, the cover offers a great picture of what readers can expect. These pieces surround readers like a blanket, muting the chaos of life when it occasionally breaks in.

Even the pieces with titles like “Supreme Despair Song” carry a certain kind of quietude. In that particular case, it’s immediately followed by a poem about yogurt. It’s so common for poetic turns to feel like a twist of the knife—it’s a nice alternative to see some that feel like rolling over in bed.

Unfortunately, the velvet-lined dreamscape Zapruder weaves here is often so smooth as to be frictionless. Many of the poems land the same way it does when someone shares a dream over breakfast—“Hm, I wonder if that means anything”—a momentary interruption before thinking about the day ahead or the toast that’s burning or almost anything else. Furthermore, some of these pieces seem to have been written during the height of the COVID pandemic, such as “The Evening Meeting,” and poems about Zoom calls feel like unpleasant relics at this point.

Thankfully, the collection ends strong. “Failed Elegy” is one of the most gorgeous poems I’ve read in a while, and it acts as an argument for the form’s limitations, suggesting that there are better places to be than the heart of a poem. It is such a succinct picture of the book’s guiding principle, and I wish it were one of the first pieces in the book so that it would frame everything else accordingly.

All in all, I Love Hearing Your Dreams feels like the perfect book to spend an afternoon and a cup of tea with, and I think it will reward readers who seek the comfort of poems that create room for them.

Thanks to NetGalley and Liveright for the ARC!

Reading Frank X. Walker’s Load in Nine Times feels akin to walking through a great museum gallery—you know you won’t get everything the first time around, but it’s so good that you start planning your next trip before you’ve even finished.

I currently live in Kentucky. It’s a weird place because it feels littered with the bones of slavery, but it seems like longtime residents are quick to look past that or find alternate explanations. There’s just a whole history to talk around. Walker chooses instead to let this history talk.

Load in Nine Times feels like a rebuttal to the tendency to romanticize the lives of emancipated soldiers. While Walker celebrates their heroism, he also acknowledges a complicated reality—if one is freed into violence, what does that say about our understanding of freedom? In “Unsalted,” the speaker says, “Marvel at how valiantly untrained men die.” These poems confidently explore all the hypocrisy implicit in the space between emancipation and true freedom, and Walker thoughtfully interrogates Kentucky’s resistance to upending a culture built on the backs of enslaved individuals. 

I frequently find myself struggling with historical poetry because it often sprawls out of the poet’s control, but Walker never allows that to happen, writing with an accessible style that encourages readers to look beyond the book. This is an incredibly well-researched collection, characterized by polyvocality—almost every poem is biographical in some capacity, and I found myself googling whatever I could find about each individual. It’s a wonderful set of poems because the poems aren’t the point, which makes it feel perfect for, say, a high school or college class because it seems so carefully designed to generate discussion. 

All in all, this is an excellent book, and it's one I'm excited to share with others.

Thanks to NetGalley & Amistad for the ARC!

Brad Walrond’s Every Where Alien is feverish and oppressive in its history, but how else could one present a history so full of oppression?

The book feels deeply influenced by ballroom music and culture—these poems stick to readers like sweat-soaked clothes, gradually chafing into full-blown sores by the end of the collection. Like a night of dance, their cumulative effect is far greater than their individual memorability. Even so, they feel intensely and purposefully situated, both in history and geography, as seen in the fantastic “They Crowned Him: An Elegy to Kalief Browder.” This is where Walrond’s political engagement and ear for musicality seem to converge into more than the sum of their parts, and I wish the rest of the book shared this focus.

Personally, I feel that the poems are a little too frictionless and fragmentary, with lines feeling almost interchangeable across the entirety of the book. They wash over the reader as the memory of a mood, never quite forming their own shape. A notable exception to this is the titular poem, which Walrond has also recorded to great effect on Alien Day. There are certain kinds of poems that can only live well as performance, and that feels true of this book as a whole. I would love to hear it spoken, with space for the audience to respond to resonant lines.

In this particular form, though, I imagine that Every Where Alien will be exciting for people who already like Brad Walrond’s work but unmemorable for most other readers.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC!

For better or worse, Jon M. Chu’s Viewfinder is a memoir constructed like a biopic, offering bombast, palatable revelations, and a protagonist that is likable to a fault.

With the forthcoming release of the Wicked movies, there’s never been a better time for this book. Despite helming a few massive commercial successes, Chu has been a bit of an enigma, largely remaining—or being contained—behind the scenes. His early career was as a journeyman director for big-budget sequels, and that status carried into Crazy Rich Asians, even when the movie itself showcased a distinctive vision. Viewfinder attempts to find some continuity between each of Chu’s projects, though it’s at its best when it doesn’t.

Parts of this book are exceptional, particularly the chapters surrounding the development and production of Crazy Rich Asians and In The Heights. They showcase the intentionality that Chu brings to projects that could easily be big, dumb fun. He cares. This is clearest in his description of a bidding war between Netflix and Warner Bros for Crazy Rich Asians. Although Netflix was the “smarter” choice, Chu opted for the latter’s lowball offer because of the symbolic heft of the studio’s legacy and the theatrical experience. He’s just a guy who loves movies and what they mean. Each time Viewfinderoffers these glimmers of something personal, it shines. Chu has so many unmade passion projects, and his humility is admirable. I mean, he chose to direct Step Up 2 because he decided his mother’s judgment was better than Steven Spielberg’s.

But a lot of this book just doesn’t work.

Many of the critiques leveled at Chu’s movies are true of Viewfinder—it’s an effective, stylish pastiche of familiar narrative beats. We see a Forrest Gump-like charmed life where famous people populate the margins and hard work always pays off. I don’t fault Chu for this issue—I think the problem originates with his cowriter, Jeremy McCarter. There are too many moments where readers can feel strained attempts to add connective tissue that simply isn’t there. For example, Chu’s excitement about technology is contorted into prophetic insight about the role of the internet. One gets the sense that McCarter refuses to allow many of these life details to just “be”—they always need to constellate into a simple connect-the-dots pattern. Readers are then presented with dueling images—the Jon Chu whose career has been driven by creative risks and a scrappy, excited exploration, and the fully-formed cinematic genius whose life is essentially promo for Wicked.

It’s a strange feeling to wish a book were a little rougher around the edges, but that's the case here. If you’re interested in movies, it’s a good time; if you’re interested in Jon M. Chu, you won’t necessarily see too much of him in this Viewfinder.

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

Don’t let the title fool you—Dorianne Laux’s Finger Exercises for Poets is for everyone, even people who don’t “get” poetry.

Finger Exercises feels like a workshop with your favorite professor, as Laux removes everything esoteric about poetry while still welcoming the mystery of its abstraction. She leads readers and writers through dozens of poems, examining a variety of themes and mechanics so that people can better understand how to put them in practice. The exercises themselves are directive but never prescriptive, and Laux creates ample room for readers to take them any number of ways.

I love how practical the book is, but what I love even more is how generous it is without ever being condescending. Laux recognizes that you can’t learn to write until you learn to read, and one can sense the delight she takes in helping people stretch their interpretive skills. At one point, Laux writes, “Why poetry? To be bewildered,” and I think the book’s greatest strength is how the author shifts the embarrassment of “I don’t understand poetry” to the excitement of bewilderment. The difference between confusion and exploration is perspective.

On top of all that, this book functions wonderfully as a collection in and of itself. Even if the exercises were ineffective or Laux’s commentary was disengaged, it would still be a joy to read such thoughtfully curated poems in conversation with each other. When everything comes together in such perfect alchemy, the result is an almost giggly effervescence. 

This one’s the real deal!

I was a little afraid to revisit E.J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others because I’ve long held it in my mind as the single most influential book I’ve read.

I’m happy to report that is still the case.

I find it most difficult to talk about things I love because I know something will be lost in my misrepresentation, but I still want to try with this book. When I first read The Magical Language of Others, it was a fluke. I saw it on sale, and I hadn’t read anything in years. I was in the midst of fairly debilitating depression and crippling anxiety, which went unexplained and untreated, and I wanted to finish a book just to prove to myself I could finish anything. This one was and is such a balm, and I look up to Koh in so many ways.

There are a lot of complex themes here that I was unable to fully appreciate the first time I read, but language and mediation are at the forefront of all of them. The book is built around Koh's translations of letters from her mother, which she received when her Korean was limited. What do you do when love has a language barrier? We also see the way history bleeds into Japan-Korea relations even today, a theme the author delicately explores more in The Liberatorsand her episode of the Pachinko TV show.

This isn't why the book is so resonant, though.

Koh writes much of the book from the crater-like center of depression, and I’m struck by how she finds beauty, not by strong-arming it into existence, but by relaxing her need for control. At one point, a doctor tells her, “You can’t be happy, but you can reasonable." This is later contrasted by a teacher harping on the need for “magnanimity” in her work, suggesting that a poem should forgive its subject or forgive its author for not forgiving its subject—“Forgiveness doesn’t need a reason. It doesn’t follow a logical thought, so it frees you from having to be reasonable.

This isn’t a story of someone finding happiness; it’s a memoir of someone learning to move in grace.

Most of the time, I feel like joy is a reasonable but unrealistic ask, but if generosity is equilibrium, I can live with that.

The memoir’s existence acts as an extension of Koh’s magnanimity toward herself, which is really special. So many memoirs seem motivated by a need to prove that a life is worth documenting; The Magical Language of Others, conversely, recognizes that every life is worth celebrating, and grief can be a medium—“What we see changes according to what we look for." That premise allows Koh to write gorgeous, precise descriptions of things that are—practically—not that interesting. It’s all a matter of attention, the kind that becomes what Simone Weil called prayer. The world is an extended metaphor.

I’ve always loved writing, but prior to reading this book, it felt really embarrassing—a needless, self-serving aspiration. And frankly, every competitive attitude I encountered in writing classes seemed to confirm that. A recurrent theme in Magical Language is that writing should be a last resort—that it can only be something if we accept it isn’t everything. Life is more important. More personally, I’ve always felt a tension between how I appear socially—gregarious, funny, and flippant—and how I actually feel about the world which is, uh, not that. I worried it would seem disingenuous for me to write as earnestly as I feel—that it would read as duplicity rather than duality. It’s a small thing, but I know from an ancient podcast episode for her now-non-existent first book that Koh is absolutely hilarious, and, if anything, knowing that only adds to the emotional complexity that pulses throughout Magical Language.

I know this review is more about myself than usual, but I think that’s a reflection of how E.J. Koh approaches her memoir—with the belief that it could be a gift for others, and that giving it away could be a form of healing in and of itself. I’m so grateful for her work, and it’s encouraged me to pursue so many life-giving things.

Thanks to NetGalley and Crown Publishing for the ARC!

Less a memoir and more an eyewitness account, Zara Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones is a brutal testimony of a life at the epicenter of violence toward Muslims in Gujarat, India.

This is one of the most information-dense memoirs I’ve encountered in recent memory. Chowdhary often writes like this is anyone’s story but her own, and while she does so with grace, it creates some structural tension in the latter half of the book, namely because its not always clear how the author situates her life in its surrounding history—a history of unbelievable cruelty.

Chowdhary excels in her depiction of violence. Americans are often numb to its realities or assume that it’s impersonal, but the author refuses to allow readers that comfort. She displays a steady and intentional hand as she shares stories that highlight conscious evil—careful decisions to inflict pain. That said, I found myself wondering if all the graphic details are actually necessary, or if they begin to underserve the author’s own story. After all, injustice is injustice, and murder doesn’t occur on a gradable scale. When Chowdhary attempts to pivot to the more intimate details of own life, they feel like they belong elsewhere—they seem almost less personal than when the author writes about her community as a whole.

The Lucky Ones also raises some interesting questions about how authors should navigate multilingualism. Chowdhary includes many extended quotes that she leaves untranslated. Occasionally, she includes paraphrases several sentences or paragraphs later, but the connection isn’t always transparent. Philosophically, I think this approach is really exciting—after all, so much meaning is contained within the specificity of a particular language, and something will always be lost with translation. Furthermore, I don’t think readers are entitled to know or understand everything. That said, if I’m being more pragmatic, I don’t think it works very well here. This is a book that is already difficult to read due to its large, unexplained lexicon of cultural-specific vocabulary—especially in the first half—and when there are such huge portions of untranslated quotes, the problem compounds. Readers will spend a great deal of time floating through pages until they find something to latch onto.

Despite these quibbles, The Lucky Ones feels like a necessary book because western coverage of religiously motivated violence in India is virtually non-existent. Zara Chowdhary seems to recognize this, and the result is a memoir that feels urgent, even if it doesn’t always feel personal.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon Element for the ARC!

Helen Phillips’s Hum is a crackling interrogation of the cost of convenience.

Recently, the internet has been feeling claustrophobic—when I check the weather, I have to watch an ad for allergy medications. Every time I look at instagram, it’s almost 70% targeted content. If I try to read the news, it’s either locked behind a paywall or sponsored by companies who benefit from controlling it. If I want to opt out, I can pay to have my own time back in an “ad-free experience.”

It seems like the entirety of the human experience is problematized so that a solution can be sold.

This is also the world Hum takes place in.

It would be easy to dismiss the book as an anti-AI, woe-is-me, “cellphones are destroying us” take on life, but it’s not that. It’s not even a dystopia in the way the marketing copy suggests. This is a story about how everything that makes life easier actually distances us from it—a world where predictive text begins to flatten and anonymize something as simple as a text between spouses. Phillips is unconcerned with the usual tropes of AI usurping our humanity; she’s more interested in how companies market the idea of humanity itself. Like our own world, the novel’s surveillance state isn’t managed by a shadowy government—it’s handled by corporations who know and exploit our buying habits.

The plot is simple, centering primarily on a brief family vacation in the Botanical Garden, an AirBnB-like resort that offers an escape from the polluted, noise-filled air of the city. It’s a smart way to depict the artifice of “authenticity," and it’s an effective backdrop for Phillips to critique iPad kids and instagram parents. That sounds simplistic, but it works because the author is so careful in how she depicts the family’s relationships to each other. They are victimized and intentionally isolated by predatory technology. At one point, the protagonist realizes that the four family members are not sharing twenty-four hours in a day; they are dividing ninety-six hours because each person is so detached.

This is a breezy book with big questions (there’s a fairly robust compendium of research at the end), and Phillips invites us to wrestle with the discomfort of a paywall between the world and the self. In other words, Hum asks us to think about the reality we already inhabit and encourages us to, well, touch grass while we still can.