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rustbeltjessie's review
5.0
I wrote it, so I'm a little biased, but here's what a couple other people had to say about it.
"Jessie Lynn McMains opens The Loneliest Show On Earth with a quirky, archetypal invitation: 'Ladies & jellyspoons, boys/& ghouls—Step right up & see/a true freak, a real/me,' drawing us into the circus and the freakish picaresque of female selfhood—'O my chimerical sister,/ my metaphor, myself.' And thus we tumble into this many-headed hybrid, a book-length novelistic poem/poemish novel that, within the image palette of the circus freak show, contemplates gender, romance, myth, loneliness, and identity. 'Yes, I traveled back & forth across America, small town to smaller, destroying amber waves/of eligible bachelors,' she riffs. 'I am a one-woman Dust Bowl.' Let it be said McMains knows the realm of which she speaks, from funnel cake to Bearded Lady to the woman who dances on shards of glass. I recommend you step right up and in; read this delight by a 'divinatrix in her tent of stars.'"
-Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
"What if a band of feral punk nomads – raised in the woods, and wielding an oracular language of intimacy, artifice, and daggers – rode into town and made a circus for the weirdos? What if The Waste Land took place on a fairground with winged girls and infants in jars? Jessie Lynn McMains's The Loneliest Show on Earth understands the gendered body like a sideshow tent of strangeness, an arena in which cacophonous voices – and stories of competing origins – play out against death in the glimmering spotlight. To quote McMains, this gorgeous and unsettling elegy is 'too damn special for the normie world'; it revels, deliriously and deliciously, in its own stunning freakiness."
-Marty Cain, author of Kids of the Black Hole
"Jessie Lynn McMains opens The Loneliest Show On Earth with a quirky, archetypal invitation: 'Ladies & jellyspoons, boys/& ghouls—Step right up & see/a true freak, a real/me,' drawing us into the circus and the freakish picaresque of female selfhood—'O my chimerical sister,/ my metaphor, myself.' And thus we tumble into this many-headed hybrid, a book-length novelistic poem/poemish novel that, within the image palette of the circus freak show, contemplates gender, romance, myth, loneliness, and identity. 'Yes, I traveled back & forth across America, small town to smaller, destroying amber waves/of eligible bachelors,' she riffs. 'I am a one-woman Dust Bowl.' Let it be said McMains knows the realm of which she speaks, from funnel cake to Bearded Lady to the woman who dances on shards of glass. I recommend you step right up and in; read this delight by a 'divinatrix in her tent of stars.'"
-Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
"What if a band of feral punk nomads – raised in the woods, and wielding an oracular language of intimacy, artifice, and daggers – rode into town and made a circus for the weirdos? What if The Waste Land took place on a fairground with winged girls and infants in jars? Jessie Lynn McMains's The Loneliest Show on Earth understands the gendered body like a sideshow tent of strangeness, an arena in which cacophonous voices – and stories of competing origins – play out against death in the glimmering spotlight. To quote McMains, this gorgeous and unsettling elegy is 'too damn special for the normie world'; it revels, deliriously and deliciously, in its own stunning freakiness."
-Marty Cain, author of Kids of the Black Hole
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