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appledumpkin's review against another edition
1.0
Honestly it just felt like pretentious nonsense. Every page felt like a fever dream.
mcckev's review
2.0
I immediately bought this book after reading Mark’s essay “Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over.” in the Paris Review.
I have a friend who is an abstract painter. When I admitted to him that I don’t get his work, he told me “it’s all about what the painting makes you feel.” Fair enough. Tsim Tsum is like an abstract painter trying to turn one of their color field paintings into a 90-minute feature length film. Perhaps if it were shorter, much shorter, than it’s already-minuscule 80 pages, it might have worked better.
I have a friend who is an abstract painter. When I admitted to him that I don’t get his work, he told me “it’s all about what the painting makes you feel.” Fair enough. Tsim Tsum is like an abstract painter trying to turn one of their color field paintings into a 90-minute feature length film. Perhaps if it were shorter, much shorter, than it’s already-minuscule 80 pages, it might have worked better.
ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
“Or if I was fastly awake under the grandfodder tree when One Turrible Water falled from the wooly Skyys. Those is not the byrds I meant. And neever is the parsnips, although One of the parsnip has a littlest feather on the tops of its heads. That parsnip is maded out of Magiks I obey.” — from “The Oldest Animal Writes A Letter Home”
TITLE—Tsim Tsum
AUTHOR—Sabrina Orah Mark
PUBLISHED—2009
GENRE—poetry
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Jewish identity, fairy tales, marriage & relationships, looking in/down on humanity, despair & hopelessness, the search for spirituality
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—LOVED the Oldest Animal poems
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“She held her stethoscope to some of the humans who had gathered, beside her, to watch. And she held it to the animals who knew not to watch. There was nothing Beatrice dreaded more than something not beating like it should. “Something here,” she explained to Walter B., waving her arms around her head, then around his, then around the world as she understood it, “is very, very wrong.” She wanted Walter B. to take from her the stethoscope away.” — from “The Stethoscope”
I connected with this collection a lot more than with her first book, THE BABIES. There was a lot of themes and images—especially the fairytale references!—that really resonated with me and the language was more navigable for me as well. A new favorite for sure!
“He carried her until one day she was gone. And the space in his chest where he had once carried her grew large. He marveled at its largeness. And he knew he would go on carrying this largeness that was once inside him a Beatrice, for a long, long time.” — from “The Name”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Further Reading—
- The Babies, by Sabrina Orah Mark
- Wild Milk, by Sabrina Orah Mark
- Ask Baba Yaga, by Taisia Kitaiskaia
- Troubled Times, by Taisia Kitaiskaia
- Lewis Carroll
llatai's review
challenging
mysterious
fast-paced
5.0
A series of prose-poems that serve as episodes in a surreal (and occasionally semi-comedic) romantic drama between Beatrice and Walter B. Conflict, heartache, tragedy, whimsy - this book has it all. I would caution that it's not a single-read sort of book; there's undoubtedly more to the meandering tale of Beatrice and Walter B. than can be digested in a single read. These poems have a veneer of simplicity, beneath which they are dense and weighty with possibility - like fairy/folk tales; this is characteristic of Sabrina Orah Mark's work and is absolutely the expectation I had when I purchased Tsim Tsum. She never disappoints.
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