Letters to Kelly Clarkson
The letters posit Clarkson as container in which a multitude of cultural neuroses about femininity, desire, and the characteristics of reality fit, leaving readers feeling anxious about their own complicity in a system which venerates Clarkson's emptiness. --Sarah Burghauser, Lambda LiteraryIn this book, 'the battle isn't outside'; rather, it is about the internal lives of women -- and one woman in particular -- struggling with the confines of 'femininity's dystopic embrace.' While the narrator, Clarkson, and the book's other women are constantly renegotiating their connections with (and disconnections from) one another and the world at large, their toughest struggles, Bloch implies, are within themselves. --Chris McCreary, The Volta