What do you think?
Rate this book
Formal Voice
Prose-poems by Eve Shelnutt.
140 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
8 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 30, 2021
A sort of rotating set of scenarios for a group of characters who sometimes have the same name as the previous story, sometimes not, told with an impressionist, poetic sensibility that makes it seem dreamlike and also unlike a story at all. It's like they're all part of some vision of "family" that Shelnutt is sending through a number of scenarios that shift gently from one to the next, but focus on love, abandonment, and growth one at a time or all at once. It seems like there is a vague incestuous theme built around the father and one of the daughters, but it's hard to tell if that was real, fantasy, or something else entirely. Overall, a beautiful read, but hard to follow in its way.
Displaying 1 of 1 review