Leaping from ballet to quilt making, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview, Idiophone is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman's compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.
"A recursive prose-poem contemplating addiction, dance, and the need for pathbreaking art... [Fusselman's] layering of her thematic ideas gives the book the feel of a mood piece-like a Steve Reich composition where riffs phase in and out-which makes it a pleasure on a sensual level."
Kirkus
"There is no mind quite like Amy Fusselman's, and to be allowed inside it via these deft, singular, surprising sentences is to enter a vibrant wonderland where everything is new and nothing is a bore."
Elisa Albert
"One of Fusselman's great talents has always been the construction of juxtapositions and equivalencies, and in this book, she doesn't disappoint: a mother is a small iridescent paper circle, an EMT is a baby bunny, alcoholism and maternal ambivalence take their places next to stacks of pancakes and a fourteen-foot-tall sculpture from Vanuatu. In outrageously simple, inexplicably tender prose, Fuss
