BLURBS (WRITING)

Vivid scenes of a vital life-in-progress.

— Gary Gach, American Book Award recipient and author of Pause, Breathe, Smile: Awakening Mindfulness When Meditation Is Not Enough. Re: “Life Drawing,” Evergreen Review, Spring/Summer 2021

---

An ode to a vanished New York by Evergreen’s Art Editor. Joy Garnett, you make me wish that I’d lived through your New York with you, living for “the odd moment, the expressive gesture.” Always interwoven with a lost city are the lost people, the lovers, the neighbors, the artists, the diners, the cars. And when you conclude that you are not sad at all to leave New York, what New York has become, you stab me in the heart.

— Jee Leong Koh, Lambda Literary Award finalist, author of Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet.

breathtaking and as poetic as an early Ricki Lee Jones song.

— Michael A. Gonzales, co-author of the groundbreaking hip-hop text Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture.

Re: “Leaving New York,” Evergreen Review, Fall/Winter 2020

---

Joy Amina Garnett’s memoir-like ‘The Sea Takes up Residence in All Parts of the City’ recounts the female narrator’s stay in Alexandria, where she combed through old book shops, searching for traces of the poetry her grandfather had published in the ’30s. Her search is accompanied by a man – a researcher, perhaps a lover – who shared her interests. He is the second-person subject to whom her narrative is addressed but is, like her deceased grandfather, absent from the narrator’s present.

— Al Bawaba, Editor’s Choice, Beirut Literary Journal Captivates The Pulse of Art, Dec 29, 2019. Re: “The Sea Takes Up Residence in All Parts of the City,” Rusted Radishes (American University of Beirut, 2019), Issue 8: Sea Change

---