An Image of My Name Enters America

August 12, 2024
In these meandering essays, novelist Ives (Life Is Everywhere) struggles to locate thematic through lines in her myriad musings. Of the five lengthy pieces, “The Three-Body Problem” is the most successful. In it, Ives recounts the anxiety she felt being pregnant in the early months of the Covid pandemic, traces the history of obstetrics from ancient Rome through the present, and decries the “excessive medicalization of childbirth in the United States,” contending that doctors rely on chemical and surgical interventions out of the paternalizing belief that pregnant people can’t “vaginally manage the exit of the ‘person’ stuck inside them.” Other entries are less focused. “Earliness, or Romance” uses the 1954 movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as a springboard to explore what Aristophanes, Freud, and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant have written about love before straying into tenuously related discussions of dreams about her son, genealogical research she’s conducted on her ancestors, and the “famous cruelty” of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. The title essay is particularly jumbled, touching on her embarrassment at composing a clunky college essay about a peer’s poem, recordings she made of fights with her first husband, and French philosopher Henri Bergson’s writings on memory, all without arriving at a cogent thesis. Long-winded and puzzling, these pieces struggle to find the point. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

September 15, 2024
Author and poet Ives (Loudermilk, 2019; Cosmogony, 2021) shares a new side of herself as an artist with this collection of personal essays. She immediately establishes the tone with the book's first essay, which compares the imagined experience of a fetus inside the womb to Ives' personal desire to step through a mirror and into the world of My Little Pony. In doing so, she analyzes the global history of the unicorn and the American cultural aesthetic of plastic rainbow animal dolls. That's Ives: open, curious, and researched beyond measure, always following her intellectual instincts to connect her experiences of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s with the worlds of literature, science, and art. Other essays explore Ives' discovery of romantic love, her mental health and her journey to understand depersonalization disorder, the loss of self, the constructions and relationships of language, emotional abuse, and the birth of her child. Readers of her other books know that Ives is brilliant: getting to know the person, the gorgeous mind, behind those books is a total treat.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2024
Five essays weave together myriad topics, connecting personal experience to culture and history. Ives, the author of many well-received works of fiction, poetry, and criticism, includingLoudermilk andLife Is Everywhere, harnesses her extraordinary intelligence, knowledge, and background in a collection that radiates from her experience of pregnancy and childbirth at 40. The first, "Unicorns," offers a deep dive into the history of unicorn iconography, as the author ties it to her passion for a childhood toy in sentences such as these: "The My Little Ponies seem to lack the sorts of mnemonic affordances (e.g., writing or social institutions) that would allow them to retain intergenerational memories, and, in any case, although baby My Little Ponies exist, the My Little Ponies appear to be immortal, unaffected by death"; "The unicorn, nickering behind bluish trees, is so natural, so much a part of what is natural, which is to say so much not a part of what is human, that it does not exist. It fades into the mist of a human fantasy about the natural world." In the titular essay, Ives puzzles out the mystery of her heritage and discovers a surprising connection to an essay she wrote in college, and she also discusses her obsession with museum period rooms and the Assyrian genocide. "Earliness, or Romance" is an illuminating examination of the "cursed" filmSeven Brides for Seven Brothers, while "The End" is an abecedarian as well as a record of a nervous breakdown, a beautiful collage proceeding through the alphabet with Kafka, Richard Rorty, Winona Ryder, and many others in attendance. Finally, in "The Three-Body Problem," Ives connects Liu Cixin's sci-fi novel to the matters of pregnancy and childbirth. A dazzling display of knowledge, wit, ratiocination, and prose style, though possibly blinding at times for lesser mortals.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.