September 17, 2015
“The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far is a magnificent work and is perhaps the most original collection of fiction I have read in a long while. These stories stretch and bend its reader as they come off the page at times like artefacts and at other times like something organic and muddy, made of bone and throbbing with an indefatigable bloodstream. They are stories that love order, beauty and anomalies. Their vibrant (and at times primal) prose pushes to find something new in writing and art, and Wikswo refuses to repose into exhaustion or fashionable politics. But don’t forget the impressionistic illustrations. These images linked to stories that are at once enigmatic and yet emotionally relatable take this book into a realm all its own.”
And
“Smart, intoxicating, mysterious, Wikswo’s debut collection of short stories, The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, is filled with ‘ultimate intimate encounters.’ In stories that diverge from the maps and jettison superficialities, she descends into new narrative territories often to come face-to-face with the unknown. War and love, family and beloveds, reality and fantasy are her themes, but they are unlike the stories of these subjects you may have read before. A kind of alchemy is at work here within Wikswo’s sensual writing. Writing that comes close to being felt bodily and brightly heard. The narrative-camera is unique as well, as it seems at once very close – its gaze delighting in the earthliness of its subject – and yet there is distance, as the pages are often sparse, most carrying just a few dozen sentences. By flipping through its near-empty pages one can rightly assume that Wikswo disregards the line between poetry and prose.”
– Reviewed by Jason DeYoung
READ THE FULL REVIEW IN REVIEW 31 HERE