elisabeth nicula reviewed Poetry State Forest by Bernadette Mayer
"What came first? Nature's 'laws' / or the way things sort of are here?"
5 stars
This bitch! ilu Bernadette
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elisabeth nicula reviewed My private property by Mary Ruefle
"Could see from the corner of my eye that there was an incredible view, but couldn't look."
4 stars
Prose poems! Liked this pretty well, liked especially that I managed to finish a whole book lol.
elisabeth nicula reviewed Vibratory Milieu by Carrie Hunter
Vibratory Milieu weaves together eight years of writing to build an interconnecting web of accretionary …
"I am the obstacle course."
4 stars
Rly liked this... fragmentation elicited lols and made dark things more tolerable.
elisabeth nicula reviewed Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck
"Jesus reduced Margery's bid for transcendence to a scrapbook of experiences."
4 stars
The Testament of Mary and this would be a good double feature. Part of my erotics curriculum.
elisabeth nicula reviewed Ariel by Sylvia Plath
"A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree."
2 stars
Not my bag... I felt I should have read it already and then did and couldn't keep any of the poems in my head even thru the duration of the poem. Weird experience.
elisabeth nicula reviewed How to Be a Good Girl by Jamie Hood
Poetry
"i have always been the sort of girl who would do anything / to have one more day even only another hour / on this wondrous earth"
4 stars
literary + full of cum.... part diary entries through the pandemic and part long poem.... I knew some of what to expect but didn't know about her beautiful descriptions of birds and plants in brooklyn's parks... good girl/bad girl..... really powerful and readable I loved it
elisabeth nicula reviewed Autobiography of red by Anne Carson
The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning …
"His eye traveled to the clock at the front of the room and he fell into the pool of his favorite question."
5 stars
Astounding lol wow. My favorite this year maybe along with The Women by Als.
elisabeth nicula reviewed Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector
Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November …
"She learned to think at a young age and because she hadn't seen any human being up close except herself, she was awestruck, she suffered, her pride was painful, sometimes light but almost always difficult to carry."
5 stars
Life is but a dream
elisabeth nicula reviewed Cascadia by Brenda Hillman
Named for the ancient landform that preceded present-day California, Brenda Hillman's Cascadia creates from geological …
"If you are Persephone you think in terms of dirt."
3 stars
I think her topics might be a little too close to mine (geology, nature, california) that I kinda prefer how I would say it ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
But I did find pleasure in many phrases and shapes.
The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with …
"Before they could even reach them, the Victoria J. Peed temporarily ran aground..."
2 stars
Not really that great ha ha but worth a read if you're really into knowing everything about the Chesapeake Bay. I was hoping for a contextualized, history-from-below approach and it is more of a straight account of various pirate activities with detailed lists of the value of various booty and so on. The Oyster Wars part is pretty decent—perhaps being the most recent it has the most context.
Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen …
"yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do"
5 stars
Well there u go
elisabeth nicula reviewed Pure America by Elizabeth Catte
Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across …
"$700,000. This is how much the regret for fifty-five years of eugenics costs in the state of Virginia."
4 stars
I found this one both terribly eye-opening and slightly unfocused. Still, would recommend, and it's a quick read. Catte covers a lot of ground, beginning with Carrie Buck of Charlottesville and the grotesque events (including SCOTUS show trial) that led to her forced sterilization at the Lynchburg Colony. There is a brief history of eugenicist thought in the U.S.; a revisitation of the Shenandoah National Park section of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia; a pretty pleasurable skewering of UVa; and an inquiry into the mixed up architectural and eugenic history of Western State Hospital in Staunton, as viewed through its current rehabilitation by real estate developers. Pure America really zings when Catte makes obvious the underlying truths about labor—like that the fundamental point of sterilizing women like Carrie Buck was to send them to work in the homes of rich Virginians without the possibility of their being embarrassingly …
I found this one both terribly eye-opening and slightly unfocused. Still, would recommend, and it's a quick read. Catte covers a lot of ground, beginning with Carrie Buck of Charlottesville and the grotesque events (including SCOTUS show trial) that led to her forced sterilization at the Lynchburg Colony. There is a brief history of eugenicist thought in the U.S.; a revisitation of the Shenandoah National Park section of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia; a pretty pleasurable skewering of UVa; and an inquiry into the mixed up architectural and eugenic history of Western State Hospital in Staunton, as viewed through its current rehabilitation by real estate developers. Pure America really zings when Catte makes obvious the underlying truths about labor—like that the fundamental point of sterilizing women like Carrie Buck was to send them to work in the homes of rich Virginians without the possibility of their being embarrassingly impregnated by their employer (rape was a well known and accepted likelihood). I especially appreciated how she calls out the tendency of white Virginians to hyper-fixate on the portions of Virginia history we are proud of, and elide the portions we are not. That may seem obvious but for me it has been the work of a lifetime to unlearn that presentation of the past (and thus the present) I received while growing up there. She says it straight, which you don't see too much really.
elisabeth nicula reviewed WOMEN by Hilton Als
A New York Times Notable Book
Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once …
"I have not catapulted myself past my mother's emotional existence."
5 stars
Feel pretty devastated!! Feel unable to "review!" Als has an uncommon ability to know (or guess at) the interiority of others, and his own, and to describe it. Weirdly light moment for me was when some of the characters from Please Kill Me came back through in the essay about Dorothy Dean.
elisabeth nicula reviewed Baby, I Don't Care by Chelsey Minnis
Chelsey Minnis's new collection of poems follows the struggle of a flawed character in a …
"Look, it's been very hard to puppeteer myself / all these years!"
4 stars
Extravagant, funny, disturbed poetry, forming a narrative in one voice and one repeating structure through the book. Kinda like if a dissolute young 50s housewife was going out of her mind today? A love story but most often not very loving? Idk I thought it was pretty pleasurable and surprising.
elisabeth nicula reviewed Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil
A contemporary classic, Please Kill Me is the definitive oral history of the most nihilistic …
"'Of course they're great, they're the best. But they're just complete assholes.'"
5 stars
Beautifully book, really a feat of cultural immersion and storytelling and narrative-making. I laughed a lot and cried at the end.