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A review by aegagrus
Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book by Stacy Doris
3.5
Reading Edgar Garcia's Emergency, I appreciated his use of the Popol Vuh as an emotional and intellectual resource for times of crisis and transition. Reading Cheerleader's Guide, I appreciated that the same source material (among other sources) became the basis for the gruesome, violent, surreal, and immersive world in which Doris' verses are contained. A creation story is an appropriate venue for themes such as destruction, conflict, group identity, power, and the ever-contingent but nonetheless cyclical-seeming way of the world. So too is a ball game, reenacting some underlying conflict over and over in ways that are both symbolic and real. The 'leaders narrative position, slightly peripheral to these on-field conflicts but very much living in their world brings a grimly gendered angle to what is depicted.
I was not always sure how the play diagrams were supposed to interact with the text, and I sometimes felt that as a formal device it was more limiting and narrow than the stanzas themselves ended up being and didn't always fit. I would have preferred a different formal device which allowed the reader to live in the team's nightmarish-but-familiar world a little more completely, especially given the sparseness of the written material.
I was not always sure how the play diagrams were supposed to interact with the text, and I sometimes felt that as a formal device it was more limiting and narrow than the stanzas themselves ended up being and didn't always fit. I would have preferred a different formal device which allowed the reader to live in the team's nightmarish-but-familiar world a little more completely, especially given the sparseness of the written material.