Most of the brief, potent essays consider particular objects and actions and the questions they spark about value: a piano (“Dada da dum-middle class! Let the lessons begin”), redlining, investments, lines at amusement parks, the game of Monopoly, and poetry. In the same way her previous books explored the hidden social contracts around racism ( Notes From No Man’s Land) and vaccination ( On Immunity), her latest interrogates capitalism’s relationship to upper-middle-class living, particularly hers. She means it: Acquiring a home and its attendant creature comforts has radically changed her relationships to money, labor, and domesticity. “My adult life, I decide, can be divided into two distinct parts-the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after,” writes Biss. The poet and essayist considers her affluence and what-and who-has been sacrificed for it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |