Amber Dawn

If one of Michelle Tea's San Francisco novels met Wlliam Vollmann's The Royal Family in a dive-bar bathroom, engaged in a hazy, drug-fueled hook-up neither remembered the next day but both felt pretty good about, and got pregnant, the resulting child/novel would be Sub Rosa. It's dark, funny, skeezy, feminist, gross, beautiful, smart, dream-like yet absolutely true. Our narrator begins the book couch surfing in exchange for handjobs & from there, well, things can only get different. She finds happiness in Sub Rosa, a magical part of San Francisco. If Snow White or Cinderella ever turned tricks, they wouldn't survive an instant in Sub Rosa, but I bet half of Sub Rosa's inhabitants think they're fairy tale princesses and in Sub Rosa they kind of are.

But beware: there's a desperation to this delight, as in Tea's novels, as in Vollmann's. Sub Rosa is a fantasy about what happens to "all the beautiful lost children" (235), of whatever age, who go missing, never to be found. They're not dead or exploited, they're joyfully in Sub Rosa with only the looming Dark to remind them of what could be. I loved reading this, hated for it to end, but it gave me nightmares that had me waking up my dogs.… (meer)

Just really incredible, beautiful poetry--the form made me feel sort of grounded, and there are so many lines that are so beautiful--Amber Dawn does an amazing job of weaving the lines she's used in between her own work in just really remarkable and awesome ways. If you, like me, are a person who feels like you struggle to read poetry, I think this really helped me feel like I understood how to approach the poems in ways I normally don't. Even if you feel more at home in poetry, though, you should read this.… (meer)

Really beautiful and deeply generous. Dawn's poetry is cutting and tender at the same time, and the prose pieces here are really beautiful and invite the reader to sit with her (in some cases literally!) The movement across these aspects and times of her life give a good arc while also really just settling in with what it means to be older than you ever thought you would be, and what that can look like. The last piece about her wife was a really incredible and tender one to end on, and I'm really grateful to read it from where I'm sitting now. Just lovely.… (meer)

This book has so much--I just finished it and I feel sort of drained and drawn out, in a good way. The love in it is really palpable, and the horror aspects are just gut-wrenching and beautiful and hard to sit with--not in a graphic way, just in a 'gets into your bones' way. This is one of those books where I wish I had more to say that was convincing, but I loved it. It took me a second to get into it (it kind of throws you in the middle at the beginning and then reels back, and that is hard for me) but by the end it's just so much and so tender. Every character in it is just so complex and I love all of them, and the questions Starla asks about that love, as she's trying to heal and is also being hurt, are so, so... much and so important to me right now.… (meer)