September 1, 2022
After a breakup so thornily horrendous that she ended up in the hospital, poet/essayist Felix uses her childhood dyscalculia--a disorder that makes math hard to learn--as a means of understanding her missteps in love and in life. Felix's Build Yourself a Boat was long-listed for the National Book Award and short-listed for Lambda and PEN/Open Book award honors.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 31, 2022
Poet Felix (Build Yourself a Boat) recounts the implosion of a relationship in this biting memoir. After she discovered her partner had had an affair, Felix was so devastated, she writes, that she wanted “to die,” and the ensuing breakup led Felix to reflect on past traumas, specifically being repeatedly raped as a child by an older cousin, and years of largely ineffective inpatient psychiatric care. In her adulthood, a psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar two and prescribed a stabilizer, and “for the first time, things begin to add up.” Mathematical metaphors are sprinkled throughout as Felix traces her failed relationship and comes to terms with her role in its chaos (“When I spiral, I take on my own momentum, my own force, fractals of my many fractals taking on new diameter”). Her writing hums with coruscating lyricism, most notably in her depictions of the transformative effects of romantic love: Felix is “like an arrow in its quiver” and “a werewolf at the turn of the moon” as she falls deeper in love. Visceral and radiant, this soul-searching self-interrogation resonates. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Cheney Agency.
December 15, 2022
A poet's tale of heartbreak applies dyscalculia's meaning literally as well as metaphorically in order to understand a pattern of relationships. In this debut memoir, Felix opens with the discovery that her boyfriend, referred to as X, is cheating on her. Her initial indignation ("I wanted him to be sorry") gave way to begging, which landed her on the floor: "I crumble into fetal." Here, the author casts back to episodes of childhood trauma and untreated mental illness. In math, unlike relationships, "input begets output....You give what you get. You get what you are prepared to receive." Felix divides the book into three sections ("Fractals," "To Square," and "The Final Value"); use of the present tense in the first two heightens their urgency. "Fractals" details the scars she bears from her fractured upbringing; "To Square" accounts for the pain borne out of her split with X, which relates to the former. "In some spirals, there is momentum and force, in others, just patterns," she writes. "Maybe it's an algorithm. Maybe it's me." Post-breakup, Felix returned to her adolescent habit of cutting herself. The final third unfolds in the past tense as the author reckons with lifelong pain. "Black girls get to write about benign heartbreak too," she writes. Proud and saccharine and pathetic. When you're healed you tell the story differently." The text is rendered in a millennial voice, evidenced, for instance, in the author's description of herself ("Capricorn Sun, Gemini rising, Taurus Moon, Sagittarius Venus, INFP, Year of the Monkey"), and, while it may appeal mostly to 20- and 30-somethings, much of Felix's prose, like her poetry, is carved out of granite. The only footnote ends, "What I don't say in a project about truth is what gets in the way." A wildly smart, singular redemption story that is greater than the sum of its parts.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.