hybrid reviews

Review: Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

| Rebecca Valley

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica AU (New Directions 2022)

Reviewed by Hannah Wyatt

I recently read Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow—a meditation-style novella that blurs the line between interior monologue and impressionism. As the narrator travels through Tokyo with her mother, she contemplates her love for art and Greek drama, the reality of her memories, and the distance between parent and child. Separation is explored in the resentment and shame the narrator feels towards her own cultural duality, as well as the ways in which she imagines her mother’s own cultural experience following her move away from Hong Kong. Themes of place, art, and literature are explored, and so is the concept of taking up space (and a lack thereof). By the end of the story, I was left with a great sense of dreaminess and wonder, questions about the transferral of parental identity, and a fondness for Au’s storytelling.

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Review: The Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary by NoNieqa Ramos

| Rebecca Valley

The Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary by NoNieqa Ramos (Carolrhoda Lab 2019)

Reviewed by Kathryn Leonard-Peck

In this hybrid review, Leonard-Peck combines poetry and critical reading to map the emotional landscape of this stunning YA novel, which as a 2019 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection and a 2018 New York Public Library Best Book for Teens. For more reviews that challenge the form, click here.

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Special Feature: A Snail Found Poem

| Rebecca Valley

That Life Continues

Humbled by where we are in the scheme of things 

Human time as opposed to some other kind of time

We are all hostages to time

I listened carefully

Thinking about speed and slowness, 

time can feel quick and expansive

I spent a lot of time noticing

tiny, beautifully made arrows of calcium carbonate, 

I could hear it eating.

The velocity of the ill, however, is like the velocity of the snail 

I am going to withdraw from the world

We so often treat things as other

In a box in a box

This poem was created using quotes from the book and notes from our Drizzle Summer Book Club discussion on The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. It was written collaboratively by Patricia Steckler, Claudine Mininni, Sarena Brown, and Rebecca Valley. You can find the writer bios here. To learn more about the book that inspired the poem, check out our micro review.

Special Feature: A Cemetery Boys Found Poem

| Rebecca Valley

Healing

How long after he was gone would Yadriel be dreaming

The fullness of the family

they didn’t just take all pain

let people feel grief 

it was important 

to honor all those who make this community strong

“¡Mi querido!”

mourn 

loss of a loved one

Why

Growth isn’t a deviation 

growth is more 

a sphere instead of a line

This poem was created using quotes from the book and notes from our Drizzle Summer Book Club discussion on The Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas. It was written collaboratively by Ingrid Carabulea, Rey Katz, Tracy Vasquez, Sarena Brown, and Rebecca Valley. You can find the writer bios here. To learn more about the book that inspired the poem, check out our micro review.

“Diary of a Book:” Review of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

| Rebecca Valley

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams (Gallery/Scout Press 2019)

Reviewed by Amy Spaughton

With a global pandemic and lock-down looming, I, like many others right now, depend on books to take me elsewhere. Anywhere will do; the past, the future, a completely new world… Books that travel through time and space allow us to understand our current world from a safe distance. Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie, however, shows us that escapism is not the only way out. This book follows Queenie, a young Black woman in present day South London, as she navigates her relationships to love, race, and mental health. 

I’ll admit, I was initially resistant. Being brought firmly back to my hometown of South London and to this particular reality felt harsh. But then the protagonist, Queenie, mentions things like Tumblr and Twix bars and it’s oddly comforting. It feels like reading a diary. Her unyielding and often comic honesty is as refreshing as it is poignant. In honour of this intimacy, I have decided to present my review as a diary. 

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(Inter)-Review: Ends of the Earth by Kate Partridge

| Rebecca Valley

Ends of the earth by kate partridge (university of alaska press, 2017)

Reviewed by Bianca Glinskas

 Walt Whitman once described a poem as, “a place to enter, and in which to feel.” While reading Kate Partridge’s Ends of the Earth, I experienced this profound sense of transportation, and emotional surrender–the escapism and vulnerability Whitman refers to. Ends of the Earth is a portal which delivers readers into a poet’s imagination: the inventive, intangible tedium of the poet’s inner-workings, which transform attempts to make sense of the world into an art.

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