Felicia Luna Lemus

This is lovely, allusive, associative, dissociative. Lemus' writing about being separated from her wife during the California fires is visceral. You feel her loneliness, desperation, determination to make it through. I kept thinking, though, how someone like Anne Carson would have taken this to a deeper place. Lemus never gets below the surface, never takes us beneath diary-like thoughts. Moreover, I couldn't help but be distracted by the fact that a book about the California fires often had show more only a single word on a page, thus guaranteeing more fires, more global warming, more particulate matter for us all to breathe. While this is a slight book, it nonetheless earns its place as a significant piece of eco-emergency literature. show less

Particulate Matter by Felicia Luna Lemus is a moving work that is difficult to describe. Part memoir-ish and part collection of thoughts and ideas taken from a very trying year.

I loved this book but I am curious how I would have received it had I not read the Author's Statement which appears to be part of the material that accompanied the review copy but may not be part of the book. This statement contextualizes what you are about to read and I don't know how well I would have been able to show more appreciate the book without it. Many of the entries (for lack of a better word) are certainly relatable but if I had been trying to figure out why they are here rather than understand them as part of Lemus' coping I don't know that I would have gotten to the point of relating. I hope that the Author's Statement is part of the final book, it helps the reader to place these observations and comments in a bigger and far more nuanced picture.

I highly recommend this book, I found myself relating to some things while empathizing with her about others. Taken as a whole, these separate entries paint a picture of how we get through times that can seem overwhelming.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss. show less

Particulate Matter is a memoir in the form of poetic fragments. My mother kept a sort-of diary, year in and year out. Every day she noted the temperature with additional observations about the weather such as seeing a bird chasing a squirrel away from the suet or a particularly good score at Scrabble. Reading Particulate Matter reminds me of my mom’s diaries.

The book begins with the writer preparing a house for her spouse who needs to be someplace she “can breathe, literally.” People show more leaving a relationship often say they can’t breathe, but it’s a metaphor. When Lemus says literally, she means literally. Her partner needed better air, but this is not self-evident within the book. That one word, literally, is being asked to carry a lot of weight. There is an artist’s statement that came with the book for review, but if readers who buy the book don’t get this, they may feel as confused as I was when I first read the book, before reading her statement.

I think of Particulate Matter as an abstract memoir. I just made that genre up, but it seems to fit. If you look at abstract art, you can infer what it means, but you can’t be sure. Lemus makes the big things in her life abstract while detailing the minutiae.

I did not like Particulate Matter. There were moments that I liked such as the paragraph where she writes about bringing in a hummingbird nest, freezing it, and placing it on her desk. On the other hand, most of this book is less interesting than my mother’s diary entries. Several “chapters” or “poems” consist of one word. I was so irritated by this I was describing it to a friend who asked what the words were and I couldn’t remember. I told her I was “rolling my eyes too hard to read them.”

Particulate Matter will be released on November 3rd. I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing.

Particulate Matter at Akashic Books
Felicia Luna Lemus author site
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2020/10/28/particulate-matter-by-fel... show less

This is the first book in a long time that I zoomed through.

A story of love, life, and longing of one Frank aka Francesca who is managing his 20s in NYC while battling the demons of his crazy mother, late father, and all the baggage that comes with being queer and an assimilated Latin@. Underneath it all, it's a crazy love story. Still not sure if I like the ending, but the journey was good.