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Top of the pile
91
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
94/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Jody Keisner
Publisher:
University of Nebraska Press
Date:
September 1, 2022
Jody Keisner searches for the roots of the violence and fear that afflict women, starting with the working-class midwestern family she was adopted into and ending with her own experience of mothering daughters. In essays both literary and experimental, Keisner illustrates the tension between the illusion of safety, our desire for control, and our struggle to keep the things we fear from reaching out and pulling us under.
What The Reviewers Say
Gorgeous, stirring, and deeply probing exploration of what it means to be human in a world that gives us plenty of reasons to feel unsafe—particularly if we are female.
Fresh and intriguing.
Each essay in Under My Bed is exquisitely structured and beautifully written, the personal substantiated by the factual, and every seeming diversion tying into the overarching theme. Although the author writes perceptively about the predicament of living while female, there were some issues that could have been more fully explored, such as a reflection on the fact that the threat she so feared came from within her own body instead of from the outside, and a much deeper contemplation of how being adopted may have contributed to her anxieties..
Riveting.
