A review by courtneyfalling
Be with Me Always: Essays by Randon Billings Noble

3.0

I love lyrical essays, but at times I struggled with some of the craft and content decisions here. I found the first two sections the strongest, the most connected to haunting and being haunted, and I did genuinely enjoy them. But afterward the essays began to lose me: either they reiterated emotional and narrative points that had come earlier, or they diverged into other scenes so much that the main relationship to other essays only felt like Billings Noble's intense interiority. Especially in "On Looking" and "The Ownership of Memory," this interiority betrayed an uncomfortable lack of knowledge beyond the speaker's self, liberal and perhaps well-intentioned but unengaged with context, history, identity, and community, and thus not well-executed or appropriately impactful. And while I liked how the essays played with form and comparison, the reliance on literary analysis sometimes felt distracting or limiting, and so often sentences centered around weaker linking verbs when an elevation of line-to-line writing could have helped so much!