Billy's Reviews

“To read a body is to break that body a little,” Natalie Diaz writes in her second book of poetry, Postcolonial Love Poem. These innovative poems are many things: witness accounts of imperialistic and personal violence, meditations on what is gained and risked by love, unconventional odes and origin stories, and examinations of homeland and belonging. I am simply in awe of Natalie Diaz, and I reread this book as soon as I finished it.

Indigo is a book of poems about survival, pain, recovery, depth of feeling, and quantifiable joy. It is a wonder to have a new book from Santa Cruz local Ellen Bass, an inimitable poet who distills the small triumphs and constant challenges of life into poems that so reverberate with truth, they practically hum. 

No word is wasted in Everything That Rises, Joseph Stroud’s sixth collection of poetry, with its masterfully rendered poems that reach across time and landscape. Stroud invokes a wide array of poets, including Rilke, Lorca, and Sappho, and includes translations of poems from Tu Fu and Pablo Neruda, among others. The poems are a reckoning with morality and a transcendent exploration of the strange and beautiful experience of living. - Billy

Reading Feed feels like receiving a meandering text message from your funniest friend or a tweet without a character limit. Tommy Pico’s genius is in the way he is able to catch the reader off guard with uproariously funny lines that lead into serious philosophical quandaries, such as the difference between loneliness and being alone, or the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. Feed is raunchy, irreverent, haunted by the contemporary moment, and reaches for profundity. - Billy

Saeed Jones has written a memorable, powerful coming-of-age memoir, with his keen awareness of the intersection of multiple identities: to be black, to be gay, to know that being both of these can be deadly in this world. It is as much a testament to surviving the world as it is to surviving one’s own self, as Jones demonstrates with his compelling writing. Even more, it is an ode to single motherhood, an account of the determination it takes to change one’s life, and what one’s life can look like after being changed. - Billy

The Astro Poets are Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky, two accomplished poets whose humor and insight into all things astrology have propelled them to half a million followers on Twitter. With compatibility guides, playlists, and poems, Astro Poets provides a frame of reference for those who are new to astrology and dives deep for those who are well-versed in their moon and rising signs. Readers can expect to find out why Mariah Carey is the quintessential Aries, what to expect when texting a Pisces, and why Scorpios are the way that they are. Dimitrov and Lasky have written a refreshing, entertaining book of astrology that’s sure to delight anyone who has ever asked someone for their exact time of birth. - Billy

This book is an achievement—in prose that is engaging and accessible, Zuboff breaks down the logic and operating principles behind today's major tech companies, connecting the emphasis on collection of users' data to the massive profits of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and more. Zuboff unpacks the major stories you've seen in the news, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal that forced Mark Zuckerberg to testify in front of Congress, and provides a thorough analysis of the contemporary moment in order to plan and strategize for the future. Central to this book's analysis is the idea that it is impossible to compare an unprecedented event to something that has happened before, and Zuboff makes the case that the unregulated expansion of behavioral data collection by major tech companies represents an unprecedented event with dangerous implications. This book does for privacy and surveillance what Rachel Carson accomplished with Silent Spring, and should be required reading for any user of the internet or participant in a democracy. - Billy

David Wojnarowicz was many things throughout his life: a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and AIDS activist. Close to the Knives is a perennially relevant collection of intelligent, searing, and poetic essays that range from David’s teenage years on the streets of New York, working as an artist, taking a solo road trip across the country, gay life in the 1980s, the Reagan presidency, and the emergence of the AIDS crisis—all set against Daivd’s own AIDS diagnosis. Throughout the book David unflinchingly shares his worldview and reaffirms the personal as political: through profound examinations of death and survival, calls for change, and astute observations of America. “It is exhausting, living in a population where people don’t speak up if what they witness doesn’t directly threaten them.” - Billy