Reviews for The Balloonists

The average rating for The Balloonists based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-03-16 00:00:00 Bruce Clayton This is a bad complaint, maybe a refusal to meet the book on its own terms or to get my head around the goals of the lyric essay but I wish this were longer. The 2-6 sentence vignettes have a satisfying autonomy--a polaroid quality, ephemeral but firmly framed/bound--and work together often by counterpoint in the time of their perspective and subject to form a picture of Biss's childhood home and parents both as individuals and as a fracturing couple. The black box, balloonist material masks, for awhile, the direction of the narrative, while allowing her to speak to why it is we even want to know the gruesome details, the last things said before the crash while also providing, obliquely, a rationale for Biss' pointillist approach which is less concerned with the what of the last words between her parents and more with understanding who and why they were. The portraits that emerge are incredible. I found the narrative less revealing when it started to weave in Biss' own relationships as an adult and the "are we are parents or the stories our parents tell us about being a person" question. There's an unfinished quality to it, and I'm not sure if it's a result of the pressure to make a lyric essay the length of a book of poems, the unfinished, unsure stakes nature of the relationships of a youngish writer, or me asking this to be more than it is. Either way, Biss weaves together the individual vignettes so seamlessly that it doesn't feel like on is actively juggling the pieces. The reader could handle more. So hey also I found out Eula Biss is an editor at Essay press. It's all coming together.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-19 00:00:00 George Martin "Women now face the task not only of finding a form that can express what they have lived, but of finding a way to tell new stories about what they can live. Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the story of a revolutionary marriage has yet to be written. She writes that, "new definitions and a new reality about marriage must be not only lived but narrated." And must they be lived before they are narrated?" (p. 65) The writing that is most valuable to me right now is the writing that carves out new space for real questions about how to live life (and relate within any moment of it) - space that does not reference form so much as make what it makes. This is an incredibly smart and moving book - beautiful, direct, articulate, investigational, unafraid. It moves you through your own unanswered self one moment at a time, granting enough poetic space to allow for the kind of absorption that real questions require. I feel like I have been looking for this book for a long time - so glad I found it. I should have known it would be this good - EB's essay "The Pain Scale" has been one of my favorite essays to teach for as long as I've known of it. I am really looking forward to her next book, which is coming out in February...