I find it hard to evaluate poetry in translation. The translator took steps to contextualize some of the Korean puns that would be lost to an English-speaking reader, which I appreciated.

"The Salt Dress Inside Me" really stuck with me. Other than that one, I didn't connect with other poems, but instead felt stabbed in the heart by stanzas here and there in others, one of which I'll leave here.

"Moonrise" by Kim Hyesoon ... a rat gets gently-gently eaten by a cat and a cat by a hunter a girl by a mother and the mother by a grandmother ...

I've never read a nature book where an author spent so much time not finding the animal they're looking for -- no wait, scratch that, I read The Dragon Behind the Glass, but that book was specifically about trying to figure out if a specific fish still exists in the wild or only in captivity. This author goes to places where bears are supposed to be, and there's just no bears on the days she's there. Too bad, so sad, come back next year I guess?

My biggest problem with this book is that it is overly focused on bear-human interactions, instead of bears in the wild. We learn about panda breeding programs and sanctuaries for former dancing bears and the horror of the bear bile industry. We learn about grizzly attacks and the arms war between trash cans and black bears. We don't learn a whole lot about how bears live when there aren't humans around. I wanted more about that! Yes, it's important to discuss human impact on bears, and conservation efforts, and how humans and bears can coexist when we're encroaching on their territory, but I want Bear Facts (tm). If we want people to work to conserve bears, which are dangerous and sometimes scary critters (not you, pandas), we need to show them the beautiful and wonderful side of these majestic beasts.

I really enjoyed this book, but it felt inconsistent to me.

At it’s core, Radical Intimacy is about confronting he status quo and expanding our imaginations about what is possible. Radical Intimacy reframes intimacy beyond sex, to examine intimacy as self-care, as home, as relationships, in death. I found some of the transitions between topics to be a bit jarring, but found the book powerful overall. The author spends the most time discussing mental health and the abolition of carceral approaches to care. I found these parts both fascinating and confronting, in the best possible way. The author explores modern psychology as an extension of the state, in service of it, and poses questions about what truly radical care-based approaches to mental health could look like. The author also spends a lot of time examining the idea of family abolition (that is, the abolition of the Nuclear Family as an organizing structure for society). These examinations are rooted int he black radical tradition, indigenous life ways, and radical feminist critiques. 

The book poses interesting questions that I’m still thinking about, but overall, I was left wishing that the author had written a more focused book on family abolition, or mental health care, because the other topics that were covered felt somewhat surface level in comparison.

I liked this but didn't love it. A comment that reflects both the things I appreciated and found frustrating about this book is, "This reminded me of listening to indigenous elders start an event or meeting." 😂

It is frustrating, when one lives under the very real demands of survival and productivity in "clock time," as the author calls it, to be pulled into "nature time," even though you almost always come out better for it. I often would be frustrated with what at first seemed like irrelevant meandering musings when one of my mentors would open a meeting or talk, yet in the end he would somehow have told a story that was relevant, and served to refocus me on what was important: relationships, not merely checking things off the to-do list.

On the other hand, the nonlinear storytelling, and switching among different layers: natural world, personal, and societal, while the only way sometimes to paint a picture that conveys the complexity of truth, makes it difficult to follow the lines and chapters of this book. Like poetry, sometimes nature writing is some9thing I just have to let wash over me, and then spend time in a "sitting spot" to make sense of it.

P.S. I enjoyed learning about the organisms mentioned but actually wanted more information about them and/or more organisms

P.P.S. I loved the section about how nature selects for beauty and pleasure.

P.P.P.S. I had a lot of feelz about the idea of not simultaneously learning/knowing languages that specifically developed in tandem with a place over generations.