AN IMAGE OF MY NAME ENTERS AMERICA

Five essays weave together myriad topics, connecting personal experience to culture and history.

Ives, the author of many well-received works of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including Loudermilk and Life Is Everywhere, harnesses her extraordinary intelligence, knowledge, and background in a collection that radiates from her experience of pregnancy and childbirth at 40. The first, "Unicorns," offers a deep dive into the history of unicorn iconography, as the author ties it to her passion for a childhood toy in sentences such as these: “The My Little Ponies seem to lack the sorts of mnemonic affordances (e.g., writing or social institutions) that would allow them to retain intergenerational memories, and, in any case, although baby My Little Ponies exist, the My Little Ponies appear to be immortal, unaffected by death”; “The unicorn, nickering behind bluish trees, is so natural, so much a part of what is natural, which is to say so much not a part of what is human, that it does not exist. It fades into the mist of a human fantasy about the natural world.” In the titular essay, Ives puzzles out the mystery of her heritage and discovers a surprising connection to an essay she wrote in college, and she also discusses her obsession with museum period rooms and the Assyrian genocide. “Earliness, or Romance” is an illuminating examination of the "cursed" film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, while “The End” is an abecedarian as well as a record of a nervous breakdown, a beautiful collage proceeding through the alphabet with Kafka, Richard Rorty, Winona Ryder, and many others in attendance. Finally, in “The Three-Body Problem,” Ives connects Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel to the matters of pregnancy and childbirth.

A dazzling display of knowledge, wit, ratiocination, and prose style, though possibly blinding at times for lesser mortals.