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abbydee's review
I am not the only one who clings to the album as a way of experiencing music and the book-length collection as a way of experiencing a writer for many identical reasons. Death By Landscape is a really good album. Each essay is about something, with its own shape and thesis and interests. Each essay stands alone but means something a little different when situated next to others in intentional sections–Plants, Planets, and Bleed. Sometimes Wilk, like Taylor Swift, favors fade-out endings, which I find a bit of a cop-out. Though I do understand the difficulty.
Each essay is interesting for its own unique reasons, but my favorites are where Wilk is analyzing what becomes a literary phenomenon through repetition–a bunch of different stories where women morph into plants (“Death By Landscape”) or fall in love with voids (“Funhole”). These pieces are where she wears her most literary-critic-like hat, which is probably where our interests most overlap. But I was also totally fascinated by the pieces on the political possibilities of larping and the political impotence of virtual reality. Wilk feels like a writer of the moment who is pushing us into the future, someone who is opening things up rather than pinning them down.
jeffsauer's review
4.0
I liked the personal essays and the "weird vs eerie" distinction. She made larping seem interesting but imo still too embarrassing to try
emsemsems's review
3.0
‘Only Saint John the Baptist, the beheaded megasaint, stares directly out of his frame at the viewer. — Lucia’s own eyes were said to have been plucked or maybe stabbed out. She is the patron saint of eyesight because of this grisly martyrdom. — Your pain and hers, back and forth. Ouch, ouch. I love Lucia. I love the weirdness of her extra eyes — .’
Enjoyed the first half a lot more than the second.
mystic319's review
3.0
I feel like this is the type of book one might appreciate if you wanted to feel like an intellectual about the state of the world without having to do very much work about what that actually means. Much of my issues with this book come from the fact that Wilk clearly knows how to use the language of progressivism, yet many of the ideas she puts forth (particularly in Plants) echo ecofascist talking points. She generalizes humanity's relationship with nature as purely negative and extractive over and over again. She follows this up by saying maybe it would be good for the Earth if humanity vanished. Now, this line of reasoning is unfortunately very common. If you don't spend much time reading intersectional environmental literature, it's easy to fall into the idea that all people, everywhere, are bad for nature. Wilk provided very little in the way to counteract this troubled reasoning, and essentially advocated we should all just accept our inevitable change/death. It irks me that someone who supposedly spent so much time reading environmental works could not see how harmful this particular attitude is to hold, especially for marginalized groups.
That glaring issue aside, I think her essays shined the most when they focused on her personal experiences. The epilogue was perhaps the most resonant part of this book for me, but I can't say I can recommend the rest of it very strongly. You need to spend a lot of time picking apart the arguments in this book, or else you run the risk of tacitly agreeing with some pretty uninformed/borderline dangerous viewpoints, which I fear many who read this book have done. Wilk is clearly a talented author in terms of her writing skills, so this makes it really easy to agree with a bad argument dressed up in lace.
One book I will recommend in place of this one and touches upon similar ideas is Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is able to provide the image of hope in the face of climate change that Wilk is unable to deliver, and also comes from both a personal and scientific background that better inform her views about the environment and how people form relationships with it.
That glaring issue aside, I think her essays shined the most when they focused on her personal experiences. The epilogue was perhaps the most resonant part of this book for me, but I can't say I can recommend the rest of it very strongly. You need to spend a lot of time picking apart the arguments in this book, or else you run the risk of tacitly agreeing with some pretty uninformed/borderline dangerous viewpoints, which I fear many who read this book have done. Wilk is clearly a talented author in terms of her writing skills, so this makes it really easy to agree with a bad argument dressed up in lace.
One book I will recommend in place of this one and touches upon similar ideas is Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is able to provide the image of hope in the face of climate change that Wilk is unable to deliver, and also comes from both a personal and scientific background that better inform her views about the environment and how people form relationships with it.
katiejames's review
adventurous
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
jhune's review
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
Thoughtful collection of essays about climate disaster and plant life. Interspersed with half-formed ideas about womanhood drawing from misogynist ideas (being gay is equated to enjoying BDSM culture). More concerned with subversion than liberation. Mildly homophobic at times but lots of fun. The essays in Plants and Planets are the most thought provoking to me.