See Exhibit A, which I am sorry to describe. I am ashamed of my physiological responses to literature. And as Creature unravels, the body sheds itself.Ħ. 40,000 feet above the Earth, she observes its sentences, lines of thought that move across the mind, and breathes them in and out. Passing over one’s horizon of attention, the book is a meditative practice, which is not to say Creature is necessarily a meditation, for a person does not read Creature so much as she suspends it in space. Involved in it, I am pleased to feel ashamed of what I think.ĥ. This involvement is key to my wanting to recite my Creature. It will help me wear this dress.” In this darkness, I read and write and think-along, and feel involved in every sentence. “I expressed myself through the violent putting away of a pan.” “Myself, alone, in my bed, is a story.” “Write about the arm when the whole body is being abused.” “We watch something violent on my laptop. But Amina Cain’s Creature is different: Amina Cain’s Creature resides out of harm’s way, although it exists in savage and erotic twilight. Preoccupied with atmosphere and feeling as I am, I am ashamed of what I think (or don’t think) about literature, and so I choose not to write about books. Readerly impressions in my bones are intimate like pages they are, as in Creature, “the place where life unfolds.” I want to recite my Creature to you, but instead draw inward toward the place where my body’s median axis, its midline, is askew.Ĥ. My thoughts about texts exist as emotional impressions, and what interests me most as a reader is ambience and affect-words as molecules of emotion, states of agitation, decorative illuminations, background noise.

For now, I am hovering 40,000 feet above the Earth.ģ. “I’m ashamed of what I think about literature-I can only open up to a few people in this way.” So says the narrator of “The Beak of a Bird,” the fourth short story in Amina Cain’s Creature (Dorothy, 2013). I am ashamed of what I think about book reviews.Ģ. 144 pages / $12.20 buy from Dorothy, a publishing projectġ.

Creature by Amina Cain