I basically read this all in one sitting last Saturday morning. It’s a relative short book at around 220 pages, but I think I would have wanted to read it fast even if it were 400. Nichole Chung, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s read her other work (I’ve mostly done so on The (dearly departed) Toast), is a very good writer. In fact, she started writing about adoption years before this book was published; I remember reading several of her articles about it and thinking at […]
Brutally Honest
Immediate note: I am a white woman, which means of course that I have a ton of privileged and am lacking any real-world experience with racism directed at me or people who look like me. There’s sections of this book I’m just not going to address in this review, because I don’t feel that I’m qualified to. While this book is mostly about the external crisis black men face in a police state interested in oppressing and murdering them, it also addresses issues of internal […]
More than the monsters get undressed
“Forgive my bluntness, but… Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems. Ross Gay” And he can. I am not sure though if I like them or not. There are some fabulous images. He just explores what it was/is to be him. Gay, Jewish, male, a person and so much more. And he does it wonderfully, creatively, not easily through his poems. His experiences. His knowledge. Sax is not for the “I like flowers and pretty ponies” poetry crowd. He is for the “this poem will […]
Do not give the sirens call a listen
I am not sure when everyone slept in We Slept Here, unless it was a drug induced state, but Sierra DeMulder does a lot of other things, too. She does not hold back. She gives you the picture of a girl growing up in a family that allowed abuse. Oh, dad did not hit mom, so that is how they justified it, but it is forever burned into her brain her father yelling and her mother taking it. She does not hold back. She gives […]