Love to Open Up a Newsletter/Newspaper

Fri 8 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

. . . and see OKPsyche. First this morning in the Boston Globe Nina MacLaughlin included a lovely write up of Anya’s novel and then in this week’s Consortium Communiqué newsletter, there was Sam Edge’s lovely write up!

1) Boston Globe:
In Anya Johanna DeNiro’s slim and shining new novel, “OKPsyche,” published by Small Beer Press, based in Western Mass and run by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, is an exploration of ensoulment and embodiment, and the search for both, told by a trans woman in lush sink-into-it prose. Old snow takes on the look of “the coat of a cocker spaniel who needs a bath.” And “time compresses into apple seeds.” DeNiro, a trans author based in Minnesota, writes with vulnerability and force, looking at fear and shame, other people’s and the narrator’s own, looking at courage, at trans parenthood and love-finding, at the way reality and the people in it shift and bend, moving forward and backward at once. “Venus is clearly cis (myrtle, rose, apple, poppy). Venus is vengeful, unknowable (dove, sparrow, swan, hare, goat, ram) . . . Venus is able to make it up as she goes along.” In our world of violence and fires and floods, of hatred born of fear, of the regular messy tasks of living, DeNiro writes of what it is to locate, again and again, the deepest part inside oneself, with bravery, humility, and grace.

2) Consortium Communiqué, Sam Edge, Epilogue Books of Chapel Hill, NC:
“An allegorical and lyrical short novel about a transgender woman struggling to belong in a near future populated by emotional support robots and a ceaseless slew of environmental disasters.”