June 16, 2015
Read the full review of The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far in Electric Literature:
“The senses created by this reading experience are forever heightening. ‘I have followed a woman into the wilderness.’ Seriously. I have. These aren’t my words, but they apply here. When I read Quintan Ana Wikswo’s collection of stories, The Hope of Floating has Carried Us This Far, I felt as if I was following her through a type of wilderness of words. Far deeper than the sparse text on the page, down past the gorgeous yet eerie photographs Wikswo took and wove in with her text, there lives a story of something wanting to rise up. It’s continual and won’t ever plateau. Growing, yet not aging: it’s a steady stretching of each character who wants to believe in the concept of connecting. In the opening story, Wikswo writes about the need for and complexity of human connection: “I gather her letters together in a string and keep them in a place where no one will look. These secret specimens of lost words, of cartography and discovery and longing.”
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“It’s another way of saying life occurs in The Hope of Floating has Carried us This Far. Not just life as in breathing and all of our biology, but life as in the science of connection, too. The art of continuously trying to become new, to renew is discussed and discovered through Wikswo’s words. The vehicle for all of this merging and transformation doesn’t occur through plot or narrative arc, but, again, through language.”
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What we have here is a multi-sensory reading experience and it sucks you in. A large contributor to the pace and flow in this example is the use of repetition—“pray.” This technique is powerful, as it feels as if through the repeated phrases and descriptions, a momentum is gathering, a meaning shifting and maturing into larger and connected concepts. ”
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Read the full review in Electric Literature:
Into the Wilderness: The Hope of Floating has Carried Us this Far by by Quintan Ana Wikswo