Reviews and Comments

Not really that great ha ha but worth a read if you're really into knowing everything about the Chesapeake Bay. I was hoping for a contextualized, history-from-below approach and it is more of a straight account of various pirate activities with detailed lists of the value of various booty and so on. The Oyster Wars part is pretty decent—perhaps being the most recent it has the most context.

Well there u go

Feel pretty devastated!! Feel unable to "review!" Als has an uncommon ability to know (or guess at) the interiority of others, and his own, and to describe it. Weirdly light moment for me was when some of the characters from Please Kill Me came back through in the essay about Dorothy Dean.

Extravagant, funny, disturbed poetry, forming a narrative in one voice and one repeating structure through the book. Kinda like if a dissolute young 50s housewife was going out of her mind today? A love story but most often not very loving? Idk I thought it was pretty pleasurable and surprising.

Beautifully book, really a feat of cultural immersion and storytelling and narrative-making. I laughed a lot and cried at the end.

This book is not erotic.

Great fast read for people who like anti-capitalist poems.

I had a weird-for-me experience of really enjoying this book while having several critical feelings about the writing. I think because it's experimental and meandering, with verse sections and fragmentation, and I wanted them to push on those aspects harder. Many beautiful/dirty images and thoughts and moments and I would recommend it. Maybe too obvious a comparison but I found it interesting to read this after having read Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. Both situate a gender/sex narrative amidst cultural artifacts—for Paul, mostly 80s and 90s alt-pop music, and for Time, Felix Gonzales-Torres's and Roni Horn's sculptures—and the formal outcome of each book seems to turn on (or at least relate to) those choices.

Very gorgeous. The one poem plus her diary leading up to it and related and supporting writing by others incl my boyfriend Aldo Leopold.

Felt neat to read someone with the same apparent preoccupations as me—taking the same photo over and over, for one. I think she would have been writing it in 2016 but in its fragmentation, and sometimes panicked, sometimes restful contemplation, very much feels like a quarantine novel. Was nice to feel like I was in New York, seeing art, walking around, reading.

Prepared now to read Gary Indiana on any topic because I dislike true crime and adored this. Really humane, knowing writing. I underlined a lot because it was beautiful.

Christina Svenson's first book of poetry, and the first book I read in 2021! A pleasure.

Basically fuck JD Vance and fuck extraction. I guess I love a polemic.

Tender Points was originally published in 2015 and in the intervening years its topics—sexual violence, chronic illness, and inequalities of medical care—have been much in the public psyche. I found this quiet, furious account to be emotionally re-situating. Pain and place and the expression and experience of art all tangled up together, as it is.