Staff Picks: Peasants, Postpartum, and Palestine
Kate Colby. Photo: Caroline Larabell.
Kate Colby’s is the book I never knew I needed. I wrote about my love for fiction about women interacting with art, and Colby’s unique blend of poetry, essay, and autofiction offers yet another angle on that conversation. She considers works by writers such as Ben Lerner and Virginia Woolf while incorporating her meandering thoughts into the ongoing narrative of “Driving to Margaret’s Mother’s Memorial Service.” In a stream of consciousness that roves I-195, Colby contrasts her literary critique with truisms and memories that careen the reader into questions about the nature of language. At the beginning of these musings, Colby notes that “writers tend to be preoccupied with what makes everything unique, but I get hung up on the countless ways they clump.” Language, spanning topics from motherhood and middle age to metaphysical literature. Colby makes tongue twisters out of her inquiries, with exquisite turns of phrase such as “time let go and oblivious to dog hair.” She’s the kind of writer who notices both the windshield and the speck of dust on it, and is the kind of book that places them side by side and says, Look.
