August 27, 2015
“Desire bends the world with transmogrifying persistence in Wikswo’s debut collection, The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, until the reality we thought we knew erodes into the background of a whorling landscape rife with longing. The tragedy of embodiment, of our inherent separation from one another, permeates a text whose protagonists strive to rewrite the rules of creation, that it might contain a space where they can love. It is no wonder, then, that the text obliterates boundaries of form, structure, genre, and medium like a typhoon.”
“The speakers themselves mostly elude gender identification, rooting themselves in a sensuality and eroticism that transcend performative gender binaries along with increasingly outmoded delineations of sexual form. In the spirit of Virginia Woolf, who wrote nearly a century ago that a writer must be “a woman manly or a man womanly,” and the lineage of writers such as Jeanette Winterson who freely demote gender assignment to a status outside the frame, Wikswo abnegates ingrained categorizations of gender and sexuality in the interest of more unbounded explorations of how desire comes to inhabit—or even possess—the self. What is love, and what obsession? these pieces ask. How does violence imprint on the physical body; how does the body imprint on the metaphysical realm?”
– Erin Wilcox, The Rumpus