Mine

Sotos' use of collage gets more and more subtle, perhaps even more insidious or poignant depending on who you ask. Meaning that the line between weeping mother, dead girl, and Sotos himself blurs or disappears entirely because of how the words are folded. At the same time, the demarcations between the three are made ever more pronounced just because of how Sotos casts or reflects on each. In much of his work, Sotos will scorn the weeping mother and/or himself. SOmetimes he will show deep empathy for the dead and the hurt, sometimes jsut lurid fascination (or what masquerades as such). Here, he does all of these things to a degree, and that doesn't really happen in any of the other books.

The names he lingers on here, in relation to show more their images and stories, are particularly devastating and/or prurient (again, it's hard to pull apart here). Skyler Kauffmann being raped and buried alive, or the borderline urban legend of Thea Pumbroek. She only exists in a few grizzly details, and Sotos doesn't even give you those. You have to go hunt that context down. And you make it yours by doing so. By imbibing, in a way, these murdered and hurt lives, and Sotos forces us to do that in a way the news or a press release or muttered sympathy doesn't, a piece of that story becomes "ours."

I was talking with Anita Dalton as I read this book and she pointed out that the title of the book reflects this. It at once a descriptor of victim experience, parental clinging, perpetrator possessiveness, and the ownership Sotos creates for himself, whether it is mournful or caring or pornographic or lurid or something in between or wholly other. All the more, that "mine" is in the mouth of the reader now too. You are included. I am included. Maybe even in some more meaningful way than a hungry reporter or a lurid spectator we are mixed into the experience by reading about it and how it is interpreted. The "mine" lies in the mouth of the parent, the victim, the perpetrator, the writer, and at last the reader. show less