Leigh Lucas

“The story, he said, it should just move really fast, like pedal to the metal, so it doesn't get boring. Plus it's hard to write, right? You want to go in, get the job done, and get out. Like when I worked for Renee's septic tank cleaning.
I considered this and realized it was the best writing advice I'd received in years. In all my life.”

Amazing debut novel

This book is so fucking good. I am so completely happy to have gotten to read it.

“Akila takes off her headset and runs dizzily over. She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the car turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I'm honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.”

I Have Not Forgotten

I have not forgotten, neighbor,
Our red brick townhouse, tiny and quiet
With the window always cracked open
Even in winter, and us rolling together
Into the middle of the dented mattress,
A rooster in someone's courtyard crowing
In the gray, lording it over his harem
Of illegal chickens; where like gods
We couldn't stop being naked;
Those evenings the sun, superbly streaming,
Broke its sheaf of colors on the glass,
Seemed a giant inquisitive eye
Watching our long quiet suppers,
It's reflections spritzing like candlelight
On frugal tablecloth
And on the strewn pages of your manuscripts.

AFTERLOVE

Then there was a time I felt the room I was in
a prison: the young squirrel my childhood cat caught

and let go inside our house: a blur, all tail,
and my mother's scream for a more favorable

catch-and-release. The way I held it—firm
but not so tight as to bruise—how readily my hands

became a cage, such utility. Once I picked up a man

at a bar—while he slept a blue light from the bathroom
illuminated part of his body. How long I spent studying

his lone tattoo: a fly wing, in such detail, above his heart.

our father / who art in the beer section / hallowed be thy brain

“He said, / Let there be light— / And I thought I was the light. // I was man's failed imagination. // Now I know what appears / as the motion of Heaven / is just the motion of Earth. // Not stars. / Not whatever I want.”

“It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroine addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”

Just one of many scenes in this book that will stick with me for a long time:

I cried, sitting in the daylight on Elise's couch. She put her hand on mine. “I just noticed that book, the one I was reading.” “ I know,” Elise said. “I remember.” “But I'm crying about this,” I said, squeezing her hand, “not that.” It felt important then to explain these tears—crying about this, and not that, mourning our lost relationship, not my mother's death. “It's okay if it's about that,” Elise said. I don't know why I thought I could partition sadness, draw boundaries around tears, name their sources like countries on a map.

“I can eat sweet dates,// steer the car with one knee./I can look outside the window and see grass//glowing green in rain and streetlight—/so many bright beads of water.”

Beautifully written and keenly perceptive. As someone who went to girls school, I could identify so many my own experiences in the pages of this book. It's ambitious in its consideration of a large array of different girls and takes on anxiety, ambition, sexuality, sexual assault and so much more.

“dumbfounded, adj.

And still, for all the jealousy, all the doubt, sometimes I will be struck with a kind of awe that we're together. That someone like me could find someone like you—it renders me wordless. Because surely words would conspire against such luck, would protest the unlikelihood of such a turn of events.

I didn't tell any of my friends about our first date. I waited until after the second, because I wanted to make sure it was real. I wouldn't believe it had happened until it happened again. Then, later on, I would be overwhelmed by the evidence, by all the lines connecting you to me, and us to love.”

Gorgeous book, total stunner.

Patricia Smith's cover quote says it so beautifully and better than I could: “A fierce and formidable redefining of the American family, crafted in a time of havoc and impossibility. This collective lyric upends the chaos and marshals the power fo a son—struggling with questions of hue and root—as he confronts the anguish, confusion, panic, and unleashed joy of becoming a husband and father.”

Some lines that will stick with me for a long time:
“Because I have wanted/ to be a father as long/ as I have feared its weigh.”

“Because my body/ begins to fail a little more each/ morning in minute & quiet/ increments like gradual,/ gorgeous rust.”

Gorgeous book. Understated or plainly stated images are a beauty I will keep. This account of working on a trash crew takes you squelching through a dystopian future where carcasses and pepsi cans and human bodies lay waste. Absolutely would tell you to read it.

Gorgeous, exacting look at humanity, masculinity, violence, and hope. Don't miss this book.

Very interesting. A perspective I have never in my life explored... Talk about a gutsy memoir. Opened it in a bookstore not knowing what it was, sat down on the floor and read it straight through.

Hm.... I don't know what happened here. I am not a fan.

A must-read for anyone considering making comics. So thoughtful, well-researched and interesting!

I love the original Little Prince. I think something more creative could have been done in the rewrite...but fun to revisit in a new way, it made particular parts of the story stand out...

I would give this book 3.5 stars. Really interesting insight to a particular woman's relationship with Iranian culture. I learned a lot.
I think more risks could have been taken in the story's illustration as it read almost always like a straight comic strip.

Loved this! Best Batman I've read.

Not Vonnegut's best, but it's Vonnegut so it's awesome.

“On our wedding night we smiled at the antler chandelier rigged with rope and walls as cold as snow. Sorry, sorry. How on earth.”

“Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light.”