Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff
Winter 2024
by Sally Rooney
(Macmillan to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)
Irish author and literary anti-hero Sally Rooney is out with her newest, Intermezzo. Rooney, ever an astute observer of the
human predicament, doesn’t disappoint in this novel about family, chess, and the gritty messiness of grief and forgiveness.
Her distinctive prose style rises to the level of poetry,
repeatedly, distinguishing her as a writer who constantly pushes the boundaries of her craft.
—Shari Zollinger
by aby kaupang
(Parlor Press, 2023)
Lightning strikes a house amidst its residents’ profound grief, serving as both fire and aperture, this jolt giving way across
the book's expansive poem to “lightening” and “miracle & practice.” It is emblematic of the larger lyric project kaupang has built across multiple books over 15 years. Her poems are a navigation of grief’s potential to be both precise and all encompassing, but also a study of adaptation and love’s ability to suture home and body amidst loss.
—Michael McLane
by Francesca Bell
(Red Hen Press, 2023)
Spending time with Francesca Bell’s collection, I understand what it must feel like to be ocean, reaching in for mouthfuls of shore, gorging on a surplus of sand like glass teeth, porcelain shells like splintered slivers of nail. Everything gritty. Everything sharp. Everything too much and yet, feeling like I couldn’t get enough. Bell’s poems hold nothing back, dealing honestly and poignantly with the intimacies of womanhood, motherhood, love, desire, and life’s many griefs. Hers is a book you will return to again and again.
—Samantha Samakande
by Mary-Kim Arnold
(Essay Press, 2018)
This book-length lyric essay from a press known for excellent hybrid nonfiction investigates the nature of identity through
Arnold's history as a Korean-born American adoptee. Shaping the text are government questionnaires and other documents from the search for her Korean parents. Here the friction between the bureaucracy of selfhood and the individual spirit of selfhood reckons with a past dismantled by politics.
—Katherine Indermaur
by Adam Moss
(Penguin Press, 2024))
An insightful guide for multimodal writers, The Work of Art explores how ideas materialize into diverse aesthetic forms, offering practical strategies and reflections that resonate with those who blend text, visuals, audio, and more. Drawing on artist interviews and process artifacts, the book’s cross-disciplinary approach demystifies creativity, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in how varied modalities contribute to a cohesive, expressive work.
—Ben Gunsberg
by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
(Ballantine Books, 2024)
If the idea of Brigadoon as a kind of pop-up (full moons only) cake shop in Japan, run by a tortoiseshell cat who reads the horoscope of people (a script writer and a TV exec) in need of the kind of guidance only a tortoiseshell might offer in the middle of the night sounds good, then this book is for you. Dreams within dreams.
I’m on a Japanese-novelsin- translation binge lately, so I thought, “Why not?” I’m pleased I did.
—Neil Flatman
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