Chelsea Hodson's debut essay collection examines youth, sexuality and the transactional nature of desire. Mostly, she examines these things in herself.
In the first entry, "Red Letters from a Red Planet," Hodson describes two failed missions in two deserts: the Phoenix Mars Lander, which she worked on during a college job at NASA, and her relationship with Cody, whose nights in Tucson were spent brawling and spraying graffiti. "I'm Only a Thousand Miles Away" perfectly captures the all-consuming adolescent desire for a person--whether a pop star or older friend--who won't return the feeling. In other essays, Hodson stacks images, aphorisms and anecdotes on each other, constructing her life and worldview with disparate parts. "What's the end of longing?" she writes. "More longing." There's a dreamy quality to this writing, both smooth and surprising, and in these pieces she can tell an entire story in just a few lines: "I put my hand on the shoulder of my high-school boyfriend when I saw him twelve years later. It was my turn to startle him."
Throughout, Hodson layers the notions of love, sex and violence, so that they become inextricable from each other. "How about the texture of a hand on my face versus my forearm versus my thigh," she writes, "how about the heat of a slap meant as a placeholder for love or harm, you decide." Her prose is tightly crafted, which makes her simple, sharp truths--about herself and her world--that much more cutting. --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer and bookseller