Posts Tagged: microreviews

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Microreview: Claudia Cortese’s Wasp Queen

Wasp Queen by Claudia Cortese (Black Lawrence Press, 2017)

Lucy—Cortese’s recurring character, our “wasp queen”—permeates this collection with stingers and Barbie heads, gauze, shopping malls, cul-de-sacs, wisteria, Ohio, Oreos and Ring Pops, Rainbow Brite, mirrors, fire, swear words, period blood, milk teeth, “the popular girls,” dirt, chicken fingers, Cheetos, lawn elves, masturbation, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dirty Dancing, ribbons, rot, and milkshakes. Through these repeated images, Cortese invites us fully into Lucy’s world, wants us to be her friend, to make pinky-promises and eat a caterpillar with her.

The poem titles immediately engage and set up Lucy’s escapades in Midwestern suburbia—with titles such as “What Lucy’s World Looks Like,” “Lucy Selfie,” “What Lucy’s World Smells Like,” “What The Girls Named Lucy/ What Lucy Named The Girls,” “Lucy tilts the mirror of the CoverGirl compact between her legs.” The cover image of a slit filled with swarming wasps implies a vagina, a peek inside Lucy’s world of girlhood, viscera, aliveness.

De familie van Terrida toonde zich tevreden met de genomen maatregelen. “Het zal onze zoon zeker niet terugbrengen, maar misschien https://apotheekeen.com/product/tadalafil houdt het andere jongeren veilig”, zei Marianne Terrida, de moeder van de overleden patiënt, tegen de krant Jullandsposten. – Het is immers al lang bekend dat dergelijke medicijnen gevaarlijk zijn.

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Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

Even on its surface, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a beautifully constructed spiderweb of a novel. It begins with the death of Arthur Leander, an aging actor, and expands outward. On the same snowy night, a deadly Georgian Flu breaks out in North America and spreads quickly, completely wiping out 99 percent of the population. Moving back and forth in time, the narrative weaves together the lives of Arthur’s ex-wife, his college friend, the paramedic who tries to revive him, and, most centrally, Kristen Raymonde, the eight-year old child actress who witnesses his death.
Fifteen years after the collapse, Kristen is performing Shakespeare plays with the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag group of musicians and actors who wander through the half-formed settlements of the new world. Painted on their caravan is the Star Trek quote, “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they encounter a violent prophet, the symphony must once again fight to maintain their fragile existence.
At once sprawling and intimate, Station Eleven is less interested in the gore of the epidemic than it is in the aftermath, the different ways humans embark on the painstaking process of rebuilding. Both before and after the epidemic, Mandel’s complex characters grapple with the same questions, searching across an impersonal world for connection and meaning and hope.
While traveling with the symphony, Kristen remembers flying on airplane as a child. “She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations liked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness. . .” For me, Station Eleven is that pinpoint of light, that faint voice coming through a dark tunnel, a prayer for the modern world.