Description:
Ologies is Chelsea Biondolillo's debut chapbook of essays about her relationship as a woman with an interest in science. These memoir-style essays with gruesome imagery form a compelling narrative of Biondolillo's adolescence. Through these descriptions, Biondolillo claims that women can be scientists in a male-dominated, sexist field of study.
Review Quotes:
"In four formally inventive essays, Biondolillo dissects the intersections of science and violence, of nature and nurture, always concerned with touch and tactility, the collisions of things. You'll feel it all."
--Sam Martone, An Object You Cannot Lose
"I've always been mesmerized by Chelsea Biondolillo's ability to braid scientific data and observations with such longing, with such a vulnerable self. Here she creates a 'taxonomy for all [her] dark fascinations, ' inviting the reader not to turn away, but to stare, to linger in 'how things were unmade.' These essays showcase the scalpel-like precision of her language along with her skills in setting disparate texts in conversaton. 'I wanted to understand something larger from the seeing, ' she writes, which is exactly what these essays achieve through the lens of Biondolillo's mind. Maybe the simplest way to say it is this: I'm a big fan."
--Jill Talbot, The Way We Weren't: A Memoir
"Biondolillo's collection lacerates several human veins--gendered bodies, personal histories, scientific legacies--with a forceful and fearful precision. Ologies offers a pleasingly gruesome and vitally intimate dissection of the relationship between women, family, and the natural world. These are lyric essays of the sharpest order: astute, penetrating, incandescent."
--Will Slattery, Managing Editor, Essay Daily