6/8/2023 0 Comments The ugly wonderful things![]() ![]() Kelleher writes patiently, painstakingly, with a sense of unfurling not unlike the meticulous act of plucking petals, one by one, to discover what lies underneath. Much of the time, in fact, she simply revels in the beauty of her subject matter, a reveling that is frequently made manifest in her language ("the blazing crimson of a blueberry barren," for example). Not all of Kelleher's material is violent or dark. In the chapter on shells, she starts with Provincetown kitsch, moves on to the architecture of mollusks, and eventually describes the use of cowrie shells as payment for enslaved people in the 16th and 17th centuries. If anything, the book is a winding river of nearly associative thought, and the major pleasure in reading it is anticipating Kelleher's next turns. ![]()
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