laura_sackton's Reviews (170)

Whatever, it was fun I guess?
Did not really buy into the MCs getting together.
First book in this series was my favorite by far.

I did not care about this book even a little.
I think it was supposed to be this weird and beautiful book about grief?
It was so boring.

I found this to be so meh and fine.
This could be because I read it right after reading Martyr!
And I know others have loved it, I think it's a good book, I just could not make myself care after Martyr! it felt so cold.

Brilliant, gorgeous, wow wow wow.
Really amazing to read this so soon after reading TATY.
They share a heart, are very different.
He's just. He looks at things so clearly and with his whole being.

Gorgeous, gorgeous.
Fierce and fiery and passionate and loving and angry.
So many lines just stunned me.

This was great! Loved the mix of formats, including poems and conversations.
Enraging, but hopeful and full of love.

I really loved this. I’ve been so into memoirs by older trans and queer people, and this one is fantastic. Sante comes out and transitions when she’s 65ish, during the pandemic. She writes about how she’s always known she was a girl, always known she was trans, and denied it for most of her life for a whole slew of complex reasons.

Sante is so candid about why she found it hard to come out—because of where and when she grew up, because of her immigrant parents from Belgium and what she was and was not exposed to and simply what she could and couldn't imagine. How all the stories of trans people she saw seemed impossible. But she also talks about how she knew that transitioning would upend her life and cause all this turmoil. I think this is something that (cis) people maybe underestimate? Sante transitioned, and she writes about how glad she is that she did, but she also writes about hard and painful change can be, especially when that change comes with all this social stigma. It can be a really powerful force of inertia. 

I also was thinking a lot about queer timelines and trans timelines and normative timelines and how they intersect and don’t, when a queer timeline can cause violence and when it doesn’t. She talks about how of course she would have been happy if she could have come out earlier. She fantasizes about her girlhood even as she writes about some of the lovely aspects of coming out in her 60s. But what this made me think of is how it’s normative timelines that so often prevent queer timelines from happening. Like if you’re expected to grow up and get married and have kids, and somewhere in your brain you know you actually want to transition, maybe you repress that and just go through the steps of the timeline. Or maybe you’ve done all those things and get to a certain age in your life and you think, well, now I’m at the point on the timeline where there is no more change. So you don’t transition. 

I guess what I’m saying is I don’t want to say, "oh it’s so beautiful she transitioned in her 60s!" because that ignores the pain of her life. But I also don't want to say, "wow, what a tragedy that she waited until she was in her 60s!" because that is not the story she's telling, that's not honest either. I’m thinking about timelines because I think the mainstream timelines are this massive violence, and that applies to so many things. It applies to people who think trans kids can’t know who they are, because knowing who you are at 5 doesn’t fit the timeline. And it also applies to people who have gender or queer realizations later in life, because there is a right time to have those realizations, and it’s between ages 15-23 or so. There are all these expected beats that mainstream timelines require, and if we stray from those, we’re ridiculed, treated like less than adults, so there’s this huge incentive not to stray from them, and it causes so much pain. 

I’m thinking about what it would mean to discard all timelines, all social and relationship markers, all markers related to age about when you’re supposed to hit identity milestones. What freedom would we find then? 

Anyway, loved her brashness, her honesty, the way she writes about who she is and was, how she talks about how she came out in this letter and then got scared and almost sent another letter saying, "Nope I changed my mind!" I love how she talks about all the things she does that make her “bad." I really enjoyed her playfulness and fluidity and humor.

Perfect, beautiful, so much love.
I did so much crying.
I have so many feelings.

This book is stunning, it’s so beautiful, I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed reading it. It is Mary Malone Cook’s photos, paired with Mary Oliver’s writing about their life together, some journal entries of Molly’s and some poems of Mary’s. I could have read it in a sitting but I lingered, I read paragraphs over and over again and looked at the photos as deeply as I could because I did not want it to end. 

And first of all, it’s so loving, so raw, I mean it is the most beautiful tribute to someone Mary loved, the humor and love she writes about Molly with, the way she writes about their life with such gratitude and reverence and joy and all of that, yes, none of it is sugary but it’s so sweet and deep and full of care, it is so full of grief, too, every page, her describing going through old photos and journals after Molly’s death, it’s so raw and so beautiful and yeah, I just. The tribute. 

But mostly what I’m thinking about is the burden of closet that she got put into and I can’t let go of this now. Like Mary did not make herself a “queer poet” though of course she was, because her love for Molly is in all of her poems, her queerness is there even if you can’t see it. 

But the other thing this book made me realize is what a deep act of love and care it was that she didn’t write about her relationship. Like, so protective in this beautiful way. It’s not like she pretended they didn’t live together or that people in town didn’t know. She dedicated all her books to Molly. I don’t think there is an argument you can make that she was in the closet, except that the world put here there because she didn’t write blatant queerness into her poems. And it makes me so angry, not at her, never at her, honestly it feels like this profound act of love, the fact that she was so quiet about it and then this beautiful book, full of love. But angry at the world for loving her more because they could ignore her queerness. Angry at the world for celebrating her in an easier way because what she chose to write about was not overtly queer. Like I am just seething right now. 

I’m thinking about if some straight poet just hadn’t written love poems or written about his wife. And how no one would accuse that poet of hiding or being in a closet. And it’s no different here. She lived her life and wrote her heart and wrote her queerness they way all queerness gets written, in everything she did, and the world took that beautiful protective act of love, that refusal she made of herself, her determination to love and live as she chose, and said, okay, well, in that case, we can celebrate you because you haven’t said the word gay. 

Ugh. There’s just so much going on with closets and how they are made by straight people and we queer people honestly just have nothing to do with them. 

I loved reading about her quiet life in Provincetown, loved reading about the neighbors, the bookshop and photo studio that Molly ran, about how they foraged for clams and did their work as best as they could. And the talking. I also can’t get over this, how she says, “it was a forty year long conversation” and I’m thinking, well, that is why you wrote so many poems. 

Anyway, I love this book with the fire of a thousand suns.

Brilliant, beautiful, Carl Phillips is so smart and wise.
I love his sentences.
This book made me feel so deeply seen, did so much underlining.

Wow, I did not care about a single person in this book even a little bit?
What a bizarre and boring plot. No emotional depth whatsoever!
Werewolves for what reason?
Obviously not for me but could totally be for you, just not what iIm into at at the moment at all.