notanotherbookreview

  "On its front, inside a white oval with rounded edges like a pebble's was written 'Geulwoll'. Hyoyoung plucked out her air pods  and opened the door, A whole world awaited her.  Hyoyoung spent a moment enjoying the silence before her gaze to the lefthand window. Sky clear bright. The hills and mountains traced a line through the middle of the glass pane, beneath which lay a cluster of mismatched houses. Gray-orange-and crimson tiled roofs all overlapped. The scene would almost look like an oil painting." "Something else about Geulwolf had made as much an impression on her as the view: its interior walls were painted the shade of ripe apricots. the pale orange coating the knobby cement walls made her feel as though she was inside the little cardboard box in which she kept her toys, rings, hairbands as a child. Being here she felt a comfort and ease, much like she did when gazing upon the precious items all gathered together in one container, and she felt a r...

                                                  P erception, divinity, sensations brevity!        Bamboo Dart Press has reinvented the flip book (a Tete-Beche) two books in one. Beckett's MADRIGALS as cover, gives you Zegans' THE BOOK OF IMMACULATE PERCEPTION or reverse.             Innovation fits the speculative subject--the cognizance of life before language. Wondrous and inarticulate, what might that entry to the world feel like? It's a transcendental question (from where to where? How might first consciousness feel?) Parents staring at cribs, may wonder what, if anything, is perceived and felt by their inarticulate infant?  Poets can speculate, find a narrative of consciousness. Imagine the dawn. What might the evolving consciousness perceive?         In these evocative books, ...

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy's Anna Karenina   may be set in Russia in the 19th century novel, but it's certainly echoed in the eccentric unhappiness of Rebecca Waiit's modern British family in I'M SO SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY (Harper Perennial). The three adult children; Alice, Hanna, Michael, and their mum, Celia, have insights into each other's predictable, self-defeating crazy behavior. They roll eyes, wring hands,and hope others will get wise to how they are making themselves miserable. Self-knowledge is often submerged in a self-deprecating humor, that they will somehow "muddle through." "Family is worth it, it's all you may have?" is the mantra of Alice, the "good daughter," who ruefully accepts the "lack of progress" in her life.  As  I'M SO SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY opens,   Alice, in her self-assigned role of family "greeter," at the f...