Elisa Gabbert Reviews Chessy Normile and Sumita Chakraborty Debuts for NYT

Elisa Gabbert prefaces her New York Times review of Chessy Normile's debut, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party (Copper Canyon, 2020) and Sumita Chakraborty's Arrow (Alice James, 2020), with a nod back to 2013, the era of Patricia Lockwood's infamous "Rape Joke." "Humor can be used as a defense mechanism," writes Gabbert, "but it’s also a reclamation of control — a refusal to be told how to feel about your own lived (and relived) experience." She continues to think through humor in the two collections. An excerpt:

Sumita Chakraborty’s allusive and witty debut … twists familiar forms into new shapes that turn toward and challenge the reader. A series of “essays” feel playfully like cross sections of academic papers, like fractions of argument divorced from their context, the way a paragraph in isolation can read like an instant prose poem. In “Essay on Thunder,” a poem in two paragraphs, Chakraborty quotes Stendhal on “love at first sight”: “Soul-shaking upheaval means something like what he elsewhere calls the curse of passionate love, although my sense is that love here is better understood as either arousal or torpor, and that distinctions in such matters are, while necessary and true, ultimately mythological.”

Read on at the New York Times.