To me, the best poetry collections are those that provoke me to think deeply and feel deeply. While this collection felt like it had the potential to do both, it never quite lived up to that potential. The authors too often prioritized intellectual musing over emotional resonance and emotional meandering over thoughtful use of poetic technique which resulted in a work filled with enough sparks of emotional and intellectual depth to keep me reading but not enough to have a deep emotional or intellectual impact. Despite not loving this collection, I still recommend giving it a try if only to bear witness to a reasonable attempt to argue for the centering of lesbian perspectives and experiences in the poetic canon.

Magnetic and expansive, these poems almost seamlessly thread together the sacred and the sensual, the liminal and the tangible, the spiritual and the physical, the extraordinary and the mundane. Izenson’s linguistic precision grounded in gripping, embodied earthy verb and metaphor usage sent chills down my spine on almost every page and drew me into the cosmic collaboration of creation in ways I didn’t expect. While these poems are so unlike most of the poetry I love and included some portions I couldn't fully wrap my head around, I found that, overall, these poems offered a lot of liberation for me as a reader, writer, and dreamer of different worlds. If you can handle trans Jewish surrealism and sexuality, if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to experience a dream while wide awake, if you can appreciate the space where pleasure and pain overlap, then perhaps, you’ll find these poems offer some liberation for you as well.

Having learned of this book via tantalizing articles about Pittard’s divorce from a fellow writer, I worried I would find this unusual memoir less interesting than the version of her story offered by Vulture and The New York Times. I’ve almost always appreciated a good memoir but I worried my weird fascination with literary exposés on the relationships between writers would overshadow any deep pull to her writing I might have experienced. Fortunately for me, the emotional weight and intrigue of this book far overshadowed my experiences reading those articles. By the end, I felt reading this book had been like watching a train barrel towards a pedestrian in the middle of a crossroads, anticipating the collision, foreseeing the carnage, and still not being able to turn away. I was captivated practically from start to finish.

While Pittard’s style can be at times abrasive and superior, I also found it surprisingly vulnerable, insightful, and, at times, even brave. I was impressed by the various skills she juggled and choices she made throughout this book. Most notably, her ability to imply so much with so little context, her decisions on how to balance the gap between the emotional truth and the situational truth, and her commitment to exposing her own flaws in the midst of highlighting those of her platonic and romantic exes.

In more ways than I anticipated, this memoir challenged me to think about the bigger picture of how we as humans relate to each other and to ourselves. How do our privileges and insecurities intersect within our psyche? How do the misguided ways we define love hinder our ability to access genuine relationship? What do conflicts between our self-perception and the perception others have of us tell us about who we really are and what we really need from ourselves and others? How many tiny betrayals does it take for a large one to be within reach? And for those of us who are writers, where does our duty lie when crafting our art: to what people/relationships, what truth, what goals?

While this memoir is definitely not for everybody due both to its format and its author’s positionality, I’m happy to say as both a reader and writer, I found this memoir was definitely for me. I look forward to taking some of what I’ve gained from this book and infusing it into my own memoir work in the future.