gxuosi's Reviews (390)

“being possessed is like being loved.” the jeju april 3rd incident feels buried under decades of rewritten history, trauma avoidance, and the commercialization of jeju as a tourist destination. “the mermaid from jeju” begs us to not forget it.

an endless absurdist spiral into incoherency as we dance the lines between stories about bodily autonomy, control, death, and grief.

this collection wasn’t for me. it was cyclic, disjointed, and scattered. it didn’t translate for me in a way i could connect with the poems. the best of the best were all in the beginning, but for my tastes it slowly devolved.

i don’t remember there being this much smut in the book of exodus

an absolutely frantic word jumble of a collection with continually deteriorating clarity. i by far prefer chen chen’s other collection “when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities” over this one.

shut the fuck up im literally crying. satchel and fern oh my godddddd. those last 2 chapters whipped my ass. **it's a day later and i have better thoughts. i preferred legends & lattes, but really enjoyed the contextualization of viv and gallina when they were younger. i was gonna give it 4/5 up until those last 2 chapters. that sealed the 5/5.

sometimes you just gotta face north and know that there’s things you were never meant to understand

obviously wasn't really meant to be anything more than a bonus chapter for legends & lattes, which could have been done with a lot more delicacy and atmosphere than this had. with so few pages, it attempted to do far too much and so nothing was given room to breathe. there was no prose-like descriptions, we had little to no insight to viv's inner turmoil and aspirations, and there's a mystery plot that starts in the middle and ends with nothing. it really feels more like a scrapped prequel, a WIP that we were given so that it wouldn't be fully abandoned.

they spent the whole first half hating each other and then fucking. they built their entire relationship off of hate, lust, and familial duty. where was the mutual respect and understanding before she got pregnant???

after claiming independence and abolishing slavery, haiti was forced at gunpoint to sign a contract to pay 150 million francs to france, which they paid off via loans from french banks. it took 122 years and they’ve paid somewhere between 20 and 30 billion dollars in today’s money. not only does france owe haiti all of that money back, france and america owe haiti additional reparations to make up for the years of servitude, starvation, and violence they’ve suffered at the hands of western imperialism.