G

Emmalea Russo

'G is a garden and seems simple,' we're told early on in this disarming, charming, and alarming book. With its text cleaved in two across right and left pages, G reads like an exchange between garden plots and the gardener's journal--neither of which remains simple or simply wholesome from up close, when you're in the weeds. It's this up-closeness that rewards, transforming an air of levity into an air of suspension, or suspense: who or what is this G, really? (Who or what, finally, isn't?) Russo's writing, a peculiar marriage of compression and splay, embeds a germinal weirdness in the fallow page, and waits. The results are like certain mushrooms fruiting, unassuming to look at but potent with magic: 'a hindrance open.' – Anna Moschovakis