Nice combination of books in this review of Unleashed. I think we’re just getting started on this conversation, and it’s a good one.

 The energy that runs through each of these texts, the essence that enables a reviewer to begin the project of thinking such disparate works as somehow linked, is language. Language as medium for communicating; language as tool for constructing meaning; language as object detached from contextual meaning…
–Travis V. Mason

Not surprisingly, because we are often in sync, Vanessa Place also wrote a review of Kotz (a text Mason also reviews in above) for Book Forum. Here’s a fantastic snippet from Place’s review:

For Stein’s repetitions, like biblical begat’s, are chock-full of linguistic intentionality, and her bursts of lyricism, like tiny towns heaved up along the fruited plain, testify to an America made of sudden acts of can-do artifice and an Anglo-Saxon literary history.