Reviews

Fingerspell by Lindsay Illich

courtneyfalling's review

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.5

I liked this collection, but it did feel a little too wide-spanning at points. Maybe I just wanted more understanding of disability culture and the responsibilities and joys of parenting a disabled child, rather than a primary focus on the aesthetics and syntax of sign language without that deeper why. Also I didn't like how this used colonization/colonizing as a metaphor... from a white poet. A similar issue of syntax and aesthetics > substance rather than in service of. 

Main themes:
  • The small beauties of grammar and rhetoric
  • Falling out of love but trying to hold it together
  • Waiting and falling snow
  • Birds in blank cities
  • Feeling watched in between moments

Favorite poems:
  • Boilerplate
  • Flight Tracker
  • Hunger
  • Jaw
  • On Addressivity (What's Wrong? What's Wrong? What's Wrong?)
  • Proof 
  • Spectrum
  • Your Happening 
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