A review by abbydee
Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk

 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.