But the ocean remembers, so we never did boast
Forget the Sleepless Shores has been reviewed by Publishers Weekly:
The magical realism of poet and fantasist Taaffe's luscious, melancholy, and literary second collection of stories (after 2005's Singing Innocence and Experience) drowns the reader in watery imagery and complex sensory landscapes while exploring the theme of mundane relationships transformed by the intrusion of the mystical and uncanny. In the heartbreaking "Chez Vous Soon," a woman devastated by her failure to keep her lover from fatally succumbing to insanity and artistic obsession encounters his embodied muse. "The Dybbuk in Love" leans heavily into nostalgia and Jewish heritage as a century-old ghost disturbingly inhabits the minds of a suburban woman's partners to entreat her to accept him as her beloved. "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" gracefully takes on the logical legacy of the Lovecraftian mythos with a deep empathy for those called to the sea but still connected to the human world. Though most of Taaffe's stories hit their unsettling emotional mark when encountered individually, her style falls into common patterns and her prose into lulling rhythms, so that readers who indulge in the entire collection at once may lose subtle distinctions and find themselves overwhelmed by a uniform sad strangeness.
I have warned![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch that uniform sad strangeness may be the title of my sex tape from now on.
The magical realism of poet and fantasist Taaffe's luscious, melancholy, and literary second collection of stories (after 2005's Singing Innocence and Experience) drowns the reader in watery imagery and complex sensory landscapes while exploring the theme of mundane relationships transformed by the intrusion of the mystical and uncanny. In the heartbreaking "Chez Vous Soon," a woman devastated by her failure to keep her lover from fatally succumbing to insanity and artistic obsession encounters his embodied muse. "The Dybbuk in Love" leans heavily into nostalgia and Jewish heritage as a century-old ghost disturbingly inhabits the minds of a suburban woman's partners to entreat her to accept him as her beloved. "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" gracefully takes on the logical legacy of the Lovecraftian mythos with a deep empathy for those called to the sea but still connected to the human world. Though most of Taaffe's stories hit their unsettling emotional mark when encountered individually, her style falls into common patterns and her prose into lulling rhythms, so that readers who indulge in the entire collection at once may lose subtle distinctions and find themselves overwhelmed by a uniform sad strangeness.
I have warned
spatch that uniform sad strangeness may be the title of my sex tape from now on.
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Thank you!