with great respite, born from this, i am again called to my desk to write. it is littered with impatience, but the oftener i cleanse with these letters the sooner the depths of my weathered mind will see the eternal sunshine of creativity
An epic very similar in imagery and limerence to Elizabeth Smart’s poetry with striking, tasteful draws between environmental distaster and unrequited love, all organised in succession. So much nuance created along the river pulling Rachel Allen’s self out of her wood-rotting relationship. The prose and poems read like a vibrant green slideshow, the greens like that of cyanide leaves, of new bile, of toxic waste
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
I wanted to hit her behind the head with a hard baton of reality…
I needed to pause a lot whilst reading each chapter to let Smart’s metaphors take root before they quickly passed into the other, and the other, and another. It was endless, and so weighted— a dizzying, albiet charming read. The narrator spends the absolute length of this novel spiralling, employing a cultish, catastrophic lexicon. She speaks only in justifications for her ‘love’ (obsession). The narrator desperately seeks to be validated by EVERYTHING, from Evolution, to the Bible, to plumbing, to the metaphysical world at whole. Her ruse is sickening and very ridiculous. Delusions are all I see. Is that because I am not in love? No, it is because I’m not guilty.
Devoured in days. Joan Didion has a sharp pen and mind. with one clear path, she pins down the bodies of empty Americans, devoid of just — anything, and inserts a sort of magic into their persons to raise them to the heights of impressive marquis’, ones I love to filter through; feel the humidity pulsating off the plastic-human walls, the life inside these basic, basic bitches.
precise and perfect, not a word left un-perfumed, a prose blessed by this digging type of sensibility capable of transmitting dread more readily than anything I have ever read. the bees were everywhere and in everything, I have thought of swallowing many after this. the bones and the trees and the river were perfectly rebellious, and the Maraldina dwellers complete devil spawn. I cried for the river boys, for the prisoners. all the deaths I have ever called for have warped into a hive so as to hold the nectar of mercè rodoreda’s symbolisms about my soul, the honey for my desire.