‘microbursts shows that grief is communal, that love is experimental, that forms are yet to be decided. This book is a generous lesson in living and dying.’ – Maria Fusco
‘Reeder writes of grief and its siblings, anger and not knowing, with the surety of an initiate. The in-between time of illness shatters and scatters language. Thomson creates a cohesive reading space to contain these fragments. Shadows of past and future texts ghost expanses of white paper. Punctuation hangs in the balance. In these soft absences. Language has time. To regroup. To recover.’ – J. R. Carpenter
‘microbursts is… a map of loss and wonder that charts the tectonic plates of life and death at the places where they rub together.’ – Sophie Ward
‘microbursts is a master-class in the necessary constructedness of fine elegy that renders the heart-wrenching buoyant… Under the fierce beams of its fateful subject, the willingness of language to move freely, poetically, in bird-like hoverings and escapes, produces a rare haunting resonance.’ – Jeffrey Robinson
‘It’s a magical act to make something from the fragments of two lives crumbling. It might be called a work of art. To make a piece of paper out of fragments of a tree, it is necessary first to break them down into microbursts. Reconstructed it is never a tree, but it might be a map. Reeder and Thomson have made a map of grief from the fragments of two lives crumbling, a map we might be able to find our way by.’ – Joanna Walsh
‘microbursts is as elegant as it is daring, a “needlesharp” interdisciplinary primer on how to communicate the quiet discoveries and sublime pains of the lived experience. The project presents stirring testimony to the crucial roles of inquiry, Queer collaboration, and experimentation in 21st-century artmaking.’ – Margot Douaihy
‘Haunting, beautiful, honest. This is an incredibly relatable and carefully curated collection of writing and imagery about love, grief and creativity. It is a wholly original, truthful and sensitive portrayal of life and loss’ – Annie Lyons
“This is reading and writing as remembering—a dark punctuated by sharp bolts of tenderness and joy, the streaks of allegiance and annoyance that run thick through family (fault)lines. It is a reaching out past the heavy walls of illness, of care, past the confines of a page, through expectations of memoir and artist book, and into the world of the living.” Loll Jung https://mapmagazine.co.uk/microbursts-by-elizabeth-reeder-amanda-thomson
