Reviews and Comments

How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. It will make you weep; it will give you hope and destroy you at the same time. 5 stars.

I meant to read at least ten other books before this one, but when I sat down to check out the first few pages, I just kept reading straight through to the end. The world building style reminded me of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in that it brought seemingly unrelated stories together woven through with finely connected threads. Each segment has an expertly introduced setting and characters of its own, and the writer brings us into harmony with them all, as well as with the work as a whole.

The ending may not appeal to everyone, and did not quite fully appeal to me, but it works in the context of the book, and I enjoyed the skill with which Nagamatsu delivered it despite being a little alienated by the direction it went.

This book is worth every minute.

Eternally grateful to Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems by Susan Rich & Kelli Russell Agodon. The book has been so helpful to me. It has no doubt saved me from at least a year of “figuring things out.” In the introduction, the authors say they were working to create a portable mentor, and that’s exactly what this is.

This book is less about self-publishing, although inclusive of self-publishing. It’s more about getting a handle on the trends and reader/publisher expectations in how to organize your work into a cohesive project.

Emotional arc versus narrative arc. “Is the last line of one poem talking to the first line of the next?” Historical collections; Braided collections; Collaged collections; Hybrid collections; Sections/no sections and the difference in reader experience; and so much more in terms of offering a variety of ways to think about the manuscript, cover to cover.