Reviews for Face

The average rating for Face based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-24 00:00:00 Jeremy Bean I spent thirty-five minutes writing a really in-depth analysis of the issues in this volume of poetry and why I'm starting to dislike Sherman Alexie, but then I lost the whole thing because my computer mouse fell on the floor and exited me out of the web-page. So, I'll make this brief. -He's body-shaming/monitoring, talking about his and other people's size many many times. Alexie goes so far as to say that Bill Clinton was impeached "not because he was a lying asshole who slept with an intern, but because he was a lying asshole who slept with a chubby intern." He says that he is not mysogynistic for saying this, but is "actually rallying against misogyny." -He's cissexist, which is most obvious in two poems here, one about men and penises and the other about menstrual cycles and how "every woman has a story" about them. As a reminder, not all people who have menstrual cycles are women, and not all women have menstrual cycles. In conjunction with that, penises are not synonymous with man-ness. -He writes casually about sexual violence, using trigger words with little context; and he writes very casually about the violent deaths of animals. Nearly every animal mentioned in this book died in a graphically described way within lines of their introduction. It got to the point where I'd skip to the next poem if I saw any mention of an animal, because I knew only bad things could happen to them there. This next paragraph still pertains to my feelings about the author, though it deals with a different work of his. In "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian", Alexie (through his narrator) shames a white teenage girl for having an eating disorder, because his people's consumption habits were at the mercy of the United States government. As someone recovering from an ED and from self-harming habits, I'm sick of being made to feel bad for the ways that I cope with anxiety, hopelessness, and low self-esteem. Eating disorders can occur in people of any gender, any ethnicity, and any economic class, so it's really frustrating when people say that these disorders are just a "rich white girl thing". It's not something people [usually] do frivolously; it often comes out of trauma and/or a bad family environment, it can sometimes be genetic, and it can kill you. Even though it was a terrible place, I probably would have died from my own eating disorder if I hadn't been forced into a recovery clinic days after graduating high school. When you portray characters with problems as shallow people just looking for attention, you perpetuate that stereotype and make it harder for people who actually do have those problems to be taken seriously. And that is unacceptable.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-03 00:00:00 Alison Coutts Sheman Alexie is one of my favorite living writers. Not only has he written some amazing short story collections and novels (and screenplays!), but he also written a number of poetry collections. His newest book, War Dances, features a combination of short stories and poems, but this book, Face, is the first full-on poetry collection of his that I have read. I found myself caught up in his words--sometimes I was laughing and smiling, other times I felt sad and somber. Alexie is a master at crafting poems that speak to the core of our humanity. He touches on family, loss, memory, fathers, sons, sex, writers, marriage, and more. While he does write free verse, he tends to gravitate toward poems with a more formal structure, particularly the sonnet. He rhymes adeptly, even though he likes to sometimes (humorously) point out his poor attempts at rhyming. This is a collection of poems that I will return to, to read again, to savor. Favorites include: Avian Nights, Wheat, The Blood Sonnets, The Seven Deadly Sins of Marriage, Scarlet, A Comic Interlude, Nudity Clause, Psalm 101, On the Second Anniversary of My Father's Death, Size Matters, Reading Light, Thrash