…contains a review of For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs by Justin Moyer.
“”I don’t know what I’m in the process of becoming,” Kathleen Rooney concludes after contemplating her bikini wax in this uneven essay collection that glorifies its author’s 20-something ennui. “I just know that I’m going there with very little hair down there.” A self-satisfied celebration of painful grooming is a suspect vehicle for trumpeting one’s feminism. But Rooney — a poet, essayist and sometime composition teacher who wrote “Reading with Oprah: The Book Club that Changed America” and a related piece for this newspaper — is not at her best when self-congratulatory, but rather when fighting mad.
“Give me your tense shifts, your misspellings, and your passive verbs,” she writes in “I Will Catch You,” a biting condemnation of plagiarism from a professor who prefers flawed original prose to stolen work; this piece should be required reading for any new college student — and Joe Biden. Beltway insiders may prefer Rooney’s gossipy take on working as an aide for a U.S. senator. But it’s Rooney’s angrier writing — grappling with her cousin’s decision to become a nun, or her own retreat home to Chicago after a failed stint as a teacher in the Northwest — that suggest this very young author will outlast her quarter-life crisis,” he says.
You can see it in its natural habitat here. Thanks, Justin/Edie!