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avadore's review against another edition
5.0
This took me quite awhile to get through because damn is this some dense prose. Well worth the effort though - thoroughly enjoyed my time with it as well as getting good and riled up about being a woman worker and a unionist.
stevenwatts's review against another edition
5.0
"I think of how this is a city that once had the most meaningful border any city could have--that between freedom and slavery--and of what exists now in Kansas City: What borders, what traversals and reversals, could and must most urgently occur." There are worse ways to frame a class on Missouri writers, even if Boyer is maybe from Kansas no one tell my boss.
mineral's review against another edition
4.0
yes to all this no! A poetry-essay book that, towards the end, takes a turn, and becomes about being sick and being a woman, and living in Our Time (capitalism, the heat of tomorrow, the feeling of the edge of apocalypse, but not being able to really embrace any framework of speaking about it) where sickness is also work without taking a break from the rest of the work (of work that pays the rent and being a woman esp in hetero world). I love when Boyer rejects the frame of either hero or victim (in the hero lies a terrible trap, that those who are worthy enough can survive - that is, continue living days after the ordeal), but how to depict or write about the body/experience of sickness that avoids that false choice?
jdoublep's review against another edition
4.0
Anne Boyer's writings is a gulldurned national treasure. An uneven but engaging collection. Don't try to read too much at once. This is language that you should marinate in for hot minute before moving on. You hear me? Slow it down. Take yer time. That's treasure yer handling with yer Dorito-dusted lil' hands. Now...isn't that better? No hurry. Just language. No worry. Just words in which to while.
tambourine's review against another edition
5.0
a very beautiful collection of lyric / essays & fabulations. cracking open the world with song.
hignah's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
anne boyer doesn't make it easy on you, but she makes the dead speak.
at times the meditations in a handbook for disappointed fate strike with the clarity of a hand across the face: 'no', 'when the lambs rise up against the bird of prey,' 'a house that enforces isolation but denies privacy,' 'click-bait thanatos,' 'please stand still the doors are closing,' 'the harm,' 'woman sitting at a machine.'
other essays require a suspension of the belief in language, and the willingness to let boyer's poetic critique of capitalism and patriarchy inspire action through a hypnotized osmosis rather than a clarion call.
this book begs for more time. buy it, don't borrow it.
at times the meditations in a handbook for disappointed fate strike with the clarity of a hand across the face: 'no', 'when the lambs rise up against the bird of prey,' 'a house that enforces isolation but denies privacy,' 'click-bait thanatos,' 'please stand still the doors are closing,' 'the harm,' 'woman sitting at a machine.'
other essays require a suspension of the belief in language, and the willingness to let boyer's poetic critique of capitalism and patriarchy inspire action through a hypnotized osmosis rather than a clarion call.
this book begs for more time. buy it, don't borrow it.
strawberrysunset's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
3.25
i think its on me that i didn't spend enough time on this book, reading every line carefully and trying to get exactly what boyer was talking about. but some chapters were simpler than others, and those were highlighted. i was encouraged to read this book because a snippet of her section on how reading is not just reading books really got to me. unfortunately, after reading that book, that one snippet is still the only thing that actually got to me.