There’s No Turning Back – Alba de Céspedes
One by one, the women of the Grimaldi will abandon the security of its walls, rather like an Il Duce-era Virgin Suicides.
That feeling of disorientation might be my favorite thing about poetry. I think poems can bring about new possibilities by skirting the edges of sense, or they can expand our capacity for sense-making.
[The protagonist’s] worst fears about the corrupting properties of domination have come true. They have moved through this particular crosscurrent of power and emerged someone they never wanted to be.
Hjorth reworks that old aphorism: unhappy stories are all alike. It’s the ones that eke out a kind of happiness that set themselves apart.