Renee Gladman’s fiction defies easy categorization Here, Gladman turns her eye to the essay, focusing on questions of bodies and time. Gladman obsesses and opens new airways at the levels of sentence, story, essay, sequence, model, and of discrete words that draw themselves through the thickness and unexpectedness of their phonemes…each essay is a fragment, a new beginning, discontinuous from its neighbors but in conversation with them…each transformation is a calamity, unresolved but pointing to further possibilities. Gentle prying leads to memorable phrases, ballooning images, and twisty thoughts that take us deep into the syntax of calamity. Reading Gladman, I sometimes feel I’m watching a mastermind manipulate a Rubik’s Cube, except the goal isn’t to solve it but to present every possible arrangement. The book is a welcome addition to the tradition of experimental literature exploring the boundaries of genre, identity, and artistic expression.Ī standalone masterpiece. Her prose is vivid, meandering, and acute. Gladman pushes up against the boundaries of narrative while nestling comfortably within it. And it reminds us, most forcefully, that narrative is erotically phenomenological. Calamities at once demands and inhibits it solicits and perturbs. The reading experience is one drenched in the constant feeling of ignition and obstruction. The pieces are captivating in their humanness Gladman captures the serpentine path neuroses travel through her consciousness.
Billed as a book of essays, Calamities enters that exciting, genre-neutral territory between prose and poetry. Of course, Gladman’s work can be counted on to live up to even the most handsome of book jackets. A must-read for creators of all shapes, or even better those creators who shift shapes, who name in a number of languages, who can’t think of themselves as any one thing-so in that way, a book for everyone. It’s appropriate that Calamities would enact this sort of intersection of identities-that it would shift tectonically between them, shimmering all the while. Through this sharp, dense, and utterly rewarding book, Gladman manages to achieve an impossible balance between the intellectual rigor of an academic, the linguistic sensibility of a poet, and the probing logical fantasy of a visual artist. *E-book available on Amazon, Kobo, Scribd, and elsewhere. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader. WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)Ī collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.
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