Boxing the Compass

Sandy Florian’s gorgeous meditation, Boxing the Compass, begins with kinds of unfolding, a sort of anti-origami of intention and desire: like love letters or lovers’ bodies, exposing and withholding simultaneously. Any reader who opens herself, himself to this book is risking a special kind of pleasure. But the presiding engagement is not pleasure itself, but experience of unfolding, which can also be violent—an earthquake is a cosmic origami, and an accurate account of the mind awakening in this extraordinary book.

This novella of compressed, accreting, hungry paragraphs is full of sparkling diction and pinching rhythms; mysteriously, it silhouettes its interlocking motifs. Geography, family sadness, facts about the Old and New Worlds come into play. A real pleasure of a book.