Suicide Blond’s first sentence “Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?” threw me off immediately. I like a little foreplay at least in the first paragraph, and the introductory sentence left me feeling like the victim of a literary drive by. This is...
Ginger is an older teen, aimless and into casual sex and drugs, hanging with a local bad boy, Ted, and his even badder best friend, Steve. Hers is an odyssey of American suburbia, where an ugly poetic aesthetic can be found in the seediness of strip malls. She is definitely not the kind of role m...
This wasn't my favorite book in the whole world. It was kind of what I would expect a young author in her 20s to write back in the 80s. Heck, it's the kind of stuff I attempted to write in college after reading authors like that. A lot of the references really dated the book and, while this is mi...
Milk was not my first experience reading Darcey Steinke’s work. I read Suicide Blonde by Steinke back in 2008, and adored it, so I was thrilled about reading another book with her mesmerizing ideas and fluid writing style. Milk is about the intersecting lives of three characters: Mary, new mother...
Our first few days staying there felt like a vacation. In the morning, after Dad left for his new job, we swam in the motel pool, doing cannonballs off the diving board as my mother lay out under a blue canvas umbrella with white fringe, watching cars go by on the highway. In 1972, I’d just turne...