An absolutely breathtaking review from The New Haven Advocate. This is the kind of response that makes me feel honored and grateful to be a writer.
Read the whole thing here.
“Jamison’s voice is resoundingly unique, her prose both raw and precise, fully attuned to poetry without ever rescinding an energetic narrative impulse…Jamison trusts the consciousness of her characters and her readers. At the very points a lesser writer would stumble, lurch and turn away, she stands still, stares and turns our faces to stare along with her. Her characters quiver, wanting to be both seen and unseen in their shame. We peer at Stella peering at herself in the heat of her own sickness, anorexia, on a subway car. We see Tilly, seeing herself, “transparent — like all of my thoughts were coming through my skin like sweat [...] I was wet with need and weakness, dripping everywhere, ruining everything.” We see both women dream dreams of false magistery, of the salvation of intimacy with married men, of the golden “amber fingers” of liquor that pulp and pump life out, not in…Jamison is not just marching to the beat of her own drum. She is banging out a brutal, ecstatic symphony upon it. The Gin Closet dares readers to understand how and why we abrade our bodies, ourselves, to manifest the incommunicable to one another.”