A hand with a blue knit sleeve holds up Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes, by Joshua James Amberson. The book cover has a yellow background with five blue-gray ovals suggestive of eyes overlapping down the middle. In the background are yellow and blue metal cafe chairs on a sidewalk and across the street and stone building and lit up yellow lamp attached to the building.
I’m excited to share my first book review since March 2020. Joshua James Amberson’s moving and illuminating essay collection Staring Contest explores vision and vision loss and in the review I talk a little bit about my own experience facing vision loss. (If you want to read more about that, my essay “Vision Loss and the Ekphrastic Novelist” is over here in Poets & Writers Magazine.) Here’s how the review in the Chicago Reader begins:
As a young child, Joshua James Amberson purposefully blurred his vision. He believed haziness suggested the otherworldly; it provided an escape from reality, such as the realities of growing up working class in rural Washington.