A review by abookishmagpie
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

 This essay collection is brilliantly written and handles topics that are heavy and at times hard to read about, but that makes them all the more important to take in. I found the way that Elliot used her immense talent to describe things in such lyrical yet powerful words captivating, particularly her essay where she compares dark matter to the existence of Indigenous people, their land and their culture and the way colonizers act like they "discovered" or amplified these things as if they didn't exist fully before them. I was also impressed with her ability to tell about her mother and father and her upbringing in a way that was extremely honest and yet didn't overly color it with too much emotion. I am really glad that I was introduced to this book via a Booktuber and that I took the effort to search it out and include it in some of the first books I read of this year.