laura_sackton's Reviews (170)

This book utterly floored me. Carl transitioned at 51, after a lifetime of knowing himself as a man but not living as one. The agility, humility, and self-analysis in this book is just brilliant. It's a book about wresting with masculinity, in all its ugly and benign forms. Carl interrogates how it felt to live as a woman, and all the complexities of how that life affected his experience of manhood. There is so much nuance and uncertainty and contradiction here—he’s willing to tell a lot of messy truths, and the result is a book that’s one specific story of one particular trans life, but also a book that gets at all the crooks and crannies of identity. This book also has some of the clearest and most breathtaking writing about bodies—and the ways that truth, knowledge, identity, trauma, history and experience live in bodies—that I’ve ever read.

A section of this memoir recounts how his transition affected his marriage, and those parts were painful to read. What amazed me was how many angles he was able to illuminate, even about something so intimate. He gets right to the heart of transphobia in queer communities, especially lesbian ones. But he also writes about the very real ways maleness and masculinity can harm women, and the complexity of how that plays out in queer relationships. It left me with a whole lot to chew on.

There are many gorgeous and smart lines throughout the whole thing, but here's one that will stay with me a long time: “We are still here together because we are holding on to the knowing that multiple truths, and multiple bodies, are possible.” In may ways, this book is a celebration of multiple truths, of the multiplicity of lives lived in one body, the multiplicity of bodies that one life can hold, of all the possibilities that exist in the complexity of human experience.

Also, brilliant, moving audio, narrated by the author. It is not a long listen (just over five hours) and worth every minute.

Wow, I really loved this. I rarely pick up story collections anymore, but this is the third one I've read this year and I'm surprisingly into them. All of these stories are about trans women. Beyond that, they're about ordinary life moments--family, relationships, work. Very quiet, but each one was so impactful. Favorites: "Not Bleak" and "10 Hot Tips for Shopping Success".

Wow, this was incredible. So brilliant and so good in so many ways. I stayed up way too late reading it because I couldn't put it down, and I'm still digesting it. I've enjoyed Shraya's other work, but this novel is...just a masterpiece. Will be writing a longer, thoughtful review at some point, but do yourself a favor and pick this up. Shraya writes about the realities of the internet like no one else I've encountered. Plus fame, music, art, brown womanhood and friendship, friendship between women...there is just so much in this book. And the way the whole thing unfolds is so smart, so seamless, it's heartbreaking and sometimes funny and so painfully real. Can not rave about this one enough.

The structures of these poems are complicated, the kind of visual that I find extremely difficult to read. I still really appreciated this one, and it's one I can see myself going back to. It's not the kind of poetry I can just look at and absorb I definitely have to sit with it. Very inventive and intriguing nonetheless.

So weird? What did I just read? I didn't understand most of it, but I loved it. Strange and beautiful and so full of dream logic but also about capitalism, friendship, prison abolition, writing. So many lines that just felt true and beautiful even if the context was a strange dream landscape that made no sense. Really creative, bold, inventive, compelling poems.

Wow. I'm not sure I've ever read poems that describe, and use food to make meaning, the way Yun does here. Stunning. I found it hard to put down this book once I picked it up. Wanted to underline everything.

This book took me a long time to read, but I loved it. Really appreciated the way the book felt like a memoir, the poems exploring different parts of Seuss's life, in vaguely (though not strictly) chronological order. I think the thing that stood out most, though, was the humor here. Seuss very explicitly doesn't take poetry too seriously. Many of the subjects she writes about are serious, but there's a constant thread, throughout the book, that's poking good-natured fun at the poetry, poets, writing, her own writing. It's never mean or cynical or anything like that. Rather, it feels very tender. There's a flowing, easy quality to these poems, and I think Seuss's sense of "this is poetry, we're not doing life-saving surgery here" added to that. At the same time, there are so many absolutely breathtaking lines. So many beautiful moments that made me pause. An energetic, moving collection.

Brilliant work. Felt playfully rigorous at times. I found myself reading poems over and over and over, there were so many that shifted even as I read them, so many layers of music and meaning. Will be coming back to this one.

Brown's mastery of form and language is something else. These poems are so sharp, so precise, they cut such a fine, sure line, right through the heart. I had to read each one many times over, once or twice to just let it sink in, and another time or two to take in all the layers and rhythms. This is the sort of poetry I wish I'd been able to find in high school, when I was falling in love with poetry. In many ways, it's formal. There's an economy of language that I associate with the very best poetry; every word has weight. But it's poetry of the present moment. Brown is writing about queerness and Black identity and desire and the ways bodies move around in the world. It's ordinary, horrifying, ordinary life stuff. It's vital. His work is playful but restrained. I'm not good at describing poetry, so I'm rambling, but this collection is masterful. I could read it over and over and over.

The 'duplex' poems--a form Brown invented himself that combines the sonnet, the ghazal and the blues--are especially remarkable. I got chills reading them.

Brilliant. The way Díaz structures her poems is just so good, I don't have the words for it. The line breaks take my breath away. The love poems and the brother poems were my favorites. I often judge how much I like poetry by my physical reaction to it; my heart was racing reading these. Just phenomenally good.