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A review by booksnpunks
Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza, Sarah Booker
3.0
In this essay collection, Garza opens with a really powerful statement on what it means to grieve and the relationship between grieving and writing. She discusses how grieving is an active thing which never stops happening but that through writing we constantly live through and learn to live with, and writing is one of the ways of moving through this grief.
Garza lost her sister to a horrific femicide and this collection discusses the tragic epidemic of women losing their lives to murder in Mexico. It moves through the topic with a variety of lenses, using different case studies and giving a brief summary of the Mexican political system and background.
I found some of the essays quite tough to get through and I think it was to do with Garza’s writing. As a lot of the essays are really short a lot of the information is crammed in and given to you quite intensely and so it’s a read you need to concentrate on at all times which is what took me a while to get used to and why I wouldn’t really say I enjoyed the essays, but found them absolutely invaluable nevertheless. I did however really enjoy the poems which bookended the collection and the last essay that discussed the pandemic was absolutely incredible. The bits about how the city is designed to be moved through in a vehicle and how hard it is to walk around a city but the pandemic brought back a sense of the wanderer to urban life is so fascinating.
Having a good time discovering Garza and will be reading another non-fiction and fiction book from her very soon.
Garza lost her sister to a horrific femicide and this collection discusses the tragic epidemic of women losing their lives to murder in Mexico. It moves through the topic with a variety of lenses, using different case studies and giving a brief summary of the Mexican political system and background.
I found some of the essays quite tough to get through and I think it was to do with Garza’s writing. As a lot of the essays are really short a lot of the information is crammed in and given to you quite intensely and so it’s a read you need to concentrate on at all times which is what took me a while to get used to and why I wouldn’t really say I enjoyed the essays, but found them absolutely invaluable nevertheless. I did however really enjoy the poems which bookended the collection and the last essay that discussed the pandemic was absolutely incredible. The bits about how the city is designed to be moved through in a vehicle and how hard it is to walk around a city but the pandemic brought back a sense of the wanderer to urban life is so fascinating.
Having a good time discovering Garza and will be reading another non-fiction and fiction book from her very soon.