Dodie Bellamy's When the Sick Rule the World Reviewed at the LA Times

The Los Angeles Times has reviewed Dodie Bellamy's newest collection, When the Sick Rule the World, published by Semiotext(e) this year. Nathan Deuel writes that "perhaps the most essential lesson is that Bellamy can't be easily categorized," that she "produces supple, moving and challenging work with a power that relies in part on the author looking outside her apparent comfort zone." That a "classic Bellamy approach" is the "provocative observation rendered in accessible, even humorous, language, although it's also language that can turn on you." More:

"I lived in notebooks," she tells us in "The Center of Gravity," "while in the living room my father the carpenter smokes and cusses and Mom's in the kitchen and my brother is out engaging in the juvenile delinquent behavior that will make him a high school dropout. In my notebooks, I dreamed I knew Latin and I lived in the Alps, where I hovered above the world crane-less, educated and beautiful, with a mind lofty and brilliant enough to defy."

Bellamy shines when she writes in this direct voice, when confession balances her ideas. She seems to thrive in the collision of self and concept, and she deftly deploys apparently obscure cultural vocabularies while also writing with enough self-deprecation to break down our resistances.

This is especially true of her remembrance of Acker, which involves trying to claim a piece of jewelry from the estate of the late writer and provocateur. (A "typical" Acker assignment, according to Bellamy: "write a piece in which you have sex with the most disgusting person in your family.")

You need not be steeped in experimental writing to enjoy this, as Bellamy describes the caretaker of Acker's apartment, the strange piles of her iconic outfits, as well as her own anxiety about having something that belonged to her.

Read it all at the LA Times.