Without MasteryReading and Other Forces

From the first word that isn’t a beginning word to the last word that isn’t a concluding word Sarah Wood’s gripping text journeys us through ourselves in our time. Forcing us beyond a puffed-up and thin-skinned narcissism that supposes human beings the admirable centre of everything, and finding ourselves again, uncleansed, as a force that distinguishes itself, above all, in destructiveness. This is an (un)timely work of a well versed (in)sister. It is serious without being pious, and critical without being aloof. It is writing worth reading for.

Out of the blue, yet always into this endangered blue planet, her questions, "who do you work for?", "what do you read for?", overwhelm you with cataclysmic force. You are without mastery and never more happy with her embrace of the anacoluthic, her severity, the often lol funny verity of obedient freedom that blazes on every page. At once exhilarating and serenely harmonious, this boldly distended and beautifully concatenated volume unfurls a newly inventive page of literary reading and thinking. Sarah Wood's smile-bringing, 'yes!'-inducing creations of critical, sensorial writing move in constant ricochet with the poetics of numerous artists, among whom she, in this divergent concameration, comes to be included.

Sarah Wood’s Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces is a matchless book, at once breathtaking and inspiring.

Her readings are not just readings of her chosen texts, but also readings with; and, in turn, reading with Wood leaves one enriched.

Sarah Wood's deconstruction is like an ambulance that comes to resuscitate thought. … And how to restart thinking is predicated on how to restart dreaming (dreaming is the explicit topic of a twenty-page chapter later in the book), how to fantasize — and for that we need to learn how to read, and for that, we need Sarah Wood.

Wood excels in drawing out the tensions between the materiality of writing … and the enigmatic forces that cannot be experienced in any present or contemporary ‘now’. Again, we can’t help but feel that perhaps this is too much for us to think today; we have, undoubtedly, not even begun to reckon with what Wood is trying to teach us here.