A review by margaretpinard
Descent by Lauren Russell

4.0

I raced through this book after receiving it in the mail, knowing I will come back to it in pieces. A few of the entries made me pause and grapple with the enormity of the experience or the examined ambivalence of the narrator or the incisive rhetorical questions posed. Her five-plus years of weeding through the 'biomythology' of her family tree felt familiar, like lamp-posts in a whirling storm of symbolism and characterization that we find hard to judge from inside our own skulls. I really liked the effort, I appreciated the framing and the research, and I will definitely be thinking of several lines of her poetry in the time to come.
'Nobody in Africa is swinging from trees,' indeed.