Sandblasting your Senses

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, poetry, illustrations

The book jacket blurb from the Seattle Times reads, "When Margaret Atwood is good, she's very good. And when she's barbed, she's better." So I can't say I wasn't warned.

Atwood's little book The Tent is touted as an essay collection, and it mostly is. A few chapters are poems in free verse. I read these little pieces at odd moments while reading other books. Whether she's rebuking photographers of all ilk as papparazzi, looking at orphans from a round half-dozen viewpoints (except their own...), or recasting old fairy tales to comment on society and politics, she has her stompin' boots on.

Perhaps she's working at filling the shoes of Dorothy Parker—though reading between the lines, Atwood's done better at love. Or perhaps, instead, those of Alice (Roosevelt) Longwood, of the famed pillow reading, "If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit be me." Her illustrations are an odd cross between Egyptian temple art and Dr. Seuss.

Her voluminous prior writing, both fiction and nonfiction, covers quite a spectrum, and can be warm or dry, bitter or humorous, so this little volume may simply be, as the last line in the book reads, "...the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year."