example, Jaccottet has published at least three volumes of his carnets called La Semaison (Seedtime is the usual translation ), this accumulation suggesting that “wholeness” is not an issue; rather, the nature of the broadcast “seeding,” which plants do naturally without human intervention , is what’s important. The current volume is a kind of tagteam event. There is the work by Chappuis (followed by an Ur-version Chappuis thought was lost); then a work by Taylor inspired by Chappuis (followed by a takeoff inspired by his own Chappuis-inspired notebook). There is much “seeding” to be harvested here. From Chappuis’s Notebook, Taylor has produced, as the back-cover blurb tells us, “a nuanced translation . . . evok[ing] a bygone world of childhood when we . . . discover an entire universe in a passing cloud.” “Nuanced” we take on trust—this text is not bilingual, though Taylor is generally reliable and supple. The blurb correctly identifies the leaping, sometimes randomseeming , expansively meditative nature of Chappuis’s book. One key to the work’s coherence may be slightly obscured in translation. After previous entries speak of frontal, overcast clouds, the next observes, “Plentiful, crumpled, pushed aside, rough drafts clutter up the sky—the blank page routed.” What draws these images together, in French, is that the verb brouillier means to cloud over (also to scramble like eggs), while as noun brouillion means “rough drafts.” So, the book as a whole is constantly aware of its metasubject, writing, even as it observes the weather, quotes other writers ’ use of clouds, recalls the visualizing of clouds in paintings, and turns cloudscapes into images of . . . a textured world. The second part of the book is Taylor ’s poetic response to Chappuis’s idea of “ridges.” However grounded in the author’s acknowledgment that ridges are not a feature of his native Iowa landscape, this notebook is rather more erudite than Chappuis. It stays very focused not only on actual ridges—for instance, on what Petrarch does not climb during his (in)famous ascent of Mount Ventoux—but plays out the word “ridge” through multiple languages. One may grow weary of some of this: “Ridge. Edge. Ridge. Ledge. (Grating half-rhymes.) // An almost impossible word to rhyme. // But remember: bridge. / The ridge is a bridge.” To be fair, as Taylor advises, read the book as a whole, if not for its bridging wholeness then for its “ridgey-ness,” one might say, for “There are days when all available paths are ridges, in one way or another.” Kurt Heinzelman University of Texas, Austin Dorota Masłowska Honey, I Killed the Cats Trans. Benjamin Paloff. Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2019. 176 pages. IN HER SECOND novel translated into English, Dorota Masłowska sets her sights on societal decay under capitalism and consumer culture. Joanne and Farah are close friends who hit it off right away and spend their days going shopping and taking yoga classes in the New York-esque, nearfuture American city in which they live. But when Joanne meets and falls in love with a faucet salesman and aspiring Hungarianist, Farah becomes a third wheel before eventually being left behind. As their friendship disintegrates, the two women navigate the emotional hollowness of their times and attempt to grapple with their neuroses and hang-ups in a world that prizes aesthetics over all else. At times, Masłowska is able to explore the psychological impact of living in the nightmarish hypercapitalist system she has created—a terrifying fun-house take on our own—with moving depth and precision. In one such passage, Joanne tries to express to her boyfriend the emptiness she feels in the face of her own mortality and the ways in which their physical relationship brings her as close to happiness as she can seem to get. In scenes like that, Masłowska is able to cut through the layers of vapidity that weigh down the rest of the prose. WORLDLIT.ORG 105 Books in Review Written in 2012, the novel’s almost flippant , deeply cynical tone calls to mind the excesses of the early 2000s more than the current relationship between consumer and society today. Rather than feeling connected to Farah and Joanne as well as...