Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-
[A] unique prose style ... Reveal[s] new layers of insight and truth ... Not only does Putting Myself Together pick up threads from A Small Place it extends and amplifies the claim forwarded by her turn of the century books ... Kincaid is a master of literary nonfiction’s multifarious forms ... A finely made garden: teeming, various, surprising ... Kincaid’s retrospective satisfies incompletely, provoking both our astonishment and desire for more.
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Wry, knowing, and audacious ... Early pieces display her sardonic insights into the ways African Americans were portrayed in popular culture ... Kincaid’s interpretations of her own childhood offer keys to the structures that define her fiction and wider writing ... I hope that Kincaid will write more on [the] complicated pleasure [of gardening]: the intimate dominion of the gardener in her garden ... Uncanny power.
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Kincaid’s genius lies in the way she explicitly, unwaveringly foregrounds the facts of her life ... There’s a searching quality in Kincaid’s writing that is commensurate with her lifelong desire to find a new form, and a new way of life, because the old ways make no sense to her ... This is not to say that Putting Myself Together is a completely rewarding book ... It’s an awkward arrangement ... The best piece in Putting Myself Together, the one everyone must read, is the quietly incendiary Sowers and Reapers ... It’s this kind of meditation on the ironies and absurdities of a displaced life...that makes Jamaica Kincaid so singularly important.
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