Thanks so much to Jillian Clasky for their review of Michelle Brown’s Swans. Woohoo!
“Brown refuses to hierarchize the book’s wide variety of concerns; the archetypal Party Girl’s drunken euphoria is not ignored as the backdrop to the violence she experiences as a result of the body she lives in, or dismissed as its cause, but treated with equal seriousness. Brown thus avoids the tired tropes endemic to narratives of sexual assault that position the speaker as a tragic victim, instead emphasizing the cumulative nature of the violence her speaker navigates, its ubiquity and its mundanity.
At the heart of Swans, though, is a celebration of female friendship in all its softness and viciousness, of the inextricability of the girls who “pile into a backseat, / heads in laps, teeth out, [their] driver desperate to rearrange [them].””
