Ezra is a 27-year-old non-binary gay Jew who has a serious identity crisis. He tries a terrible suicide attempt, after which his life flashes before him in fragments. I could tell this writer is a poet, his language is testament to that. But it makes the novel feel a bit unhinged.
This distinction becomes even clearer when the police arrive and shoot off tear gas seemingly indiscriminately into the crowd — there are kids in strollers, an old man and his walker with a miniature megaphone hanging around his neck. The gas moves around us like new weather. Alone together and breathing in poison, all my language won't be enough - only substitutions will do. My eyes are two sick onions. My eyes are goats slaughtered wrong. My eyes, twin libraries burning, May Day is, of course, also what the pilot says when the plane starts going down. A street medic finds me vomiting yellowish heat across the sidewalk. Wearing a red cross and a green mohawk, she stands over me and pours milk into the twin burning saucers of my eyes. In this way, I am welcomed' for a moment, into my new family.
