notanotherbookreview

                                                  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...