j/j hastain

There are lovely flashes of language here, but on the whole, meaning is--at best--ephemeral and hard to come by. I have no doubt that the author has a clear idea of what they've communicated, but I'm not sure there's enough direction here for a reader to reach those same ideas.

Perhaps, if I re-read the book over and over again, or examined each fragment in turn for minutes upon minutes, I'd see more to appreciate here than the plays of language and the sounds, but there's nothing here to draw me in to giving it that much time and energy. I generally really enjoy the focus that can come with a strong and compact chapbook, but this one was a big disappointment.… (more)