Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

Exquisite writing in tandem. More soon.

Playful, rueful, introspective look at a family grieving the loss of their mother. It’s a novel constructed on poetry, so there’s a narrative arc, characters, a path forward, but like in all good poetry, a path inward too.

Delicate and devastating and wholly original.

The first ten poems of this book made vivid for me the attraction and repulsion of my Catholicism. The miracles of self-abnegation, the terrible visions of the angelic, which are at once beautiful and murderous.

“Somewhere in the unbreakable heart of the oblivious desert.”

Gorgeous evocation of a condition of life lived on the edge.

A marvelous book of the San Francisco I used to know. My beloved Sunset District is there, with the perennial fog and Ocean Beach almost standing out as characters in the novel. But no. This is Riley's journey and she is one tightly-wound enigma wholly cut from original cloth. she's a shimmering portrait of deep hurt, of pain sublimated to such a subconscious level that you can't help but love her for it.

This novel keeps offering wonderful, surprising turns at every chapter. Changes in character perspective, in voice, time, place and experience. And yet it maintains a remarkably nuanced tone throughout.