"I will read anything K-Ming Chang publishes. I would describe her writing as viscerally poetic, not an easy style to pull off successfully. Organ Meats is such a provocative title. I was immediately reminded of A Certain Hunger, by Chelsea G. Summers, which turned out to be a pretty good comparison, though truly nothing can compare to this novel. Nobody else can write like this.

The chapter titles are hilarious and unusually long and detailed. That's the moment I knew I would really get into this story.

The kids in this novel possess more imagination than any adults I know, and that is probably the point. When you're a kid, you can see the world around you in a million iterations, and can stretch form and function, even take on the lives of animals. Every day, kids answer the question: "What does it mean to be alive?" Also its corollary: "What will we become?"

Adults misremember childhood as a simpler time. It is not. It is when there are more possibilities than ever. It is a confusing time, full of elements kids cannot yet make sense of. In a swirling river of stimuli, it's friendship that offers a life raft of safety and support. It is through friendship that we learn how to be, how to become. Who else but children, who center themselves, could see themselves as raw and exposed to the world, as transparent as glass?

The aforementioned visceral nature of the writing is by nature, metaphorical. Gleaning precise interpretations from Chang's prose is a challenge indistinguishable from excavating poetry. Many poets write prose, and some even pen novels, but none can write as skillfully as Chang, who saturates each sentence with pure poetic depth. If one could punch their hands into the story, it would feel both tense and yielding, gelatinous and smooth, squishy and surprisingly malleable. Trying to get a handle on it is a lot like trying to nail jello to the wall. You just have to go with it.

The one thing I know absolutely for sure: the author draws and retraces, again and again, the connection among all living things. Respect for all living beings is in perfect partnership with cyclical manifestation. Since we humans have tried to ignore a connection we cannot sever, the debt we owe to other living things only grows. Until we learn to develop empathy, kinship, and regard, our collective lives will continue to deteriorate. We punish ourselves for our own obstinacy.

Chang compares women to jewels, but not in the way you might think. That perfect pearl has emerged as a result of friction, sand-blasted into being, and rough-polished by life until she shines. This story is swimming in metaphorical and fever dream imagery, leaving interpretation open to each reader. Realizations rise to the surface on their own time schedule. Anything you can imagine about the lives of women and girls most probably applies. It's hard, however, to catalogue these mini-epiphanies as they appear. Everything is so fantastical, our reactions seem kind of clinical in comparison. During one mind-blowing series, all I could come up with is that women and girls so rarely belong to themselves.

I had so many random reflections while reading this novel:

The soul of a city always ends up for sale.

Cut connections can sometimes grow back.

Ghosts connect us, but not ghosts of others, but rather ghosts of ourselves.

Some people are afraid to act, because they might not succeed, so they don't even try. The rare soul reserves fear for the feeling of awe, not the fear of harm or failure.

Chang's way of relaying and relating concepts and ideas is uncanny, like how the memory of a person resides in your bones. The author turns the familiar inside out. Beyond our understanding of change, she presents the unmaking of the self as the other side of transformation. Amazingly, and perhaps incomprehensibly, the mothers in the story believe that you can only know a person's true self when you can recognize their insides. Outward appearances can be devious. You can't dress up a kidney to look like something else.

The author presents dreams stuffed with metaphors as the expressions of the roles women and girls are told to occupy. Fertility as one's highest purpose, is stretched into a smorgasbord of earthy fecundity. It is by these exaggerations that we are pointed to the truth. How many women have been leading awake-dreaming lives, and how many of them fear breaking out of that twilight existence?

As an aside, I'm very curious about other's interpretations of every symbolic element in this novel. I think I got the gist of much of it, though I know parts of the narrative slipped past me. I still don't know what the significance of the parched earth might represent, other than the idea of two worlds: the island above the water and the world underneath it, much as the author pairs other opposites, like being awake vs. dreaming. The lack of life-sustaining rain on an island surrounded by water must represent something important.

In this story, even waiting is an action, a wide-eyed determined anticipation. The very act of waiting can influence lives and events. Before reading this novel, I always thought of waiting as a passive event. Just as the author teaches us that waiting is an action, she also proposes that sleeping is an action, not a passive event. Sleep and dreams don't happen to us; we sleep and we dream. That suggests that we have some power in our dreams, in that other world.

The level of the surreal, the ethereal, and the anthropomorphic, is simply off the charts. The most difficult part of the book for readers will most likely be when the predator and prey exchange places. But, this is all allegory, and the scene is in full symmetry with the balance of opposites so central to the story. Another very uncomfortable section, mainly for its painful truth, is the depiction of the human without mercy, one who will inflict permanent damage in an insane attempt to gain control over a bond which threatens to break. Another extremely unsettling aspect of these scenes is the concept of everything being alive, of having a history, of turning the known world upside down, of upending the rules.

Where Chang's novel Bestiary is also dynamically poetic, allegorical, and visceral, Organ Meats is a whole new level of creation. Tragedy woven through myth is more gut wrenching than any event in real life. Maybe that's because there is even less control. That characteristic makes myth the perfect vehicle for describing the worst of human traits.

If you are a fan of visceral, deep, poetry-prose, the kind that challenges your mind and by twists and turns reveals a highly original mythology, then this book is for you. It is a dizzying experience, like looking down from a great height, but one that you won't want to miss, just for the jaw-dropping level of writing alone.

Thank you to Netgalley, and to One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House, for providing an uncorrected proof of this novel for review.

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