My review of Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes is in the new print issue of Rain Taxi. The review begins:
The narrator of With My Dog-Eyes – a mathematician, Amós Kéres – turns the pronoun “I” into a variable. He then turns into an alpha – or to describe the transformation in all its beauty and horror, he enters the equation: “Amós = α.” Brazilian Hilda Hilst shows Amós fighting the sort of delusional magic that leads him to make equations out of his identity. He sees the magic of his own mind, which blends math and poetry, as a part of his nature. As he states in the poem that opens Hilst’s genre-defying work:
I was born a mathematician, a magician
I was born a poet.