I Become a Delight to My Enemies

Reviews

Praise for I Become a Delight to My Enemies:

“The subject matter, while in some senses timeless, is also very much of the present moment. I Become is a book of voices, disembodied, all of its characters from a nameless town where they experienced sexual abuse and terror. Contributing to the sense of secrecy and shame, some of the text appears occasionally as marginalia, like whispered comments from the periphery of a town’s main square. No two pages are alike. The text is often in fragments, abruptly cut, as if the speakers are hesitant about how much they should say. . . . [A]n aural immersion in a town of people who need to speak out, to reveal truths, to push back against the shame, to hold out hope.” —Globe and Mail

“If Delight demands a different type of engagement—it is its own many-headed beast, consisting of mini fables, prose vignettes, poems whose lines float unmoored in white space, story shards, marginalia—it also offers a different type of reward for the persevering reader. Making sense of historical and immediate trauma is not easily pondered or plotted. It deserves a form that challenges us to slow and struggle and sit with the stories that break us.” —Toronto Star
 
“I Become a Delight to My Enemies takes massive risks that pay off often, especially when Peters refuses to tone things down and turn away. Like her excellent poetry debut, her fiction debut bodes well for her future as an author and is a surprisingly audacious offering from a new Canadian imprint.” —Winnipeg Free Press
 
“[U]ncanny and vivid. . . . Peters’s stylistic hybridity invites the reader into gaps and absences; the result is a kind of complicit questioning of narratives that must be unlearned, relearned, and inhabited.” —Quill & Quire

“I Become a Delight to My Enemies is a clever, genre-blending work that portrays a complex and deeply affective picture of feminism and femininity.” —The Puritan
Expand reviews