like a dog

by Lauren Samblanet

148 pages, Paperback

Published February 27, 2024

About the author

lauren samblanet is a hybrid writer who cross-pollinates with other forms of making & other makers of forms. her first book, like a dog, is published by punctum books. some of her writing has been published in a shadow map: an anthology by survivors of sexual assault, fence, dreginald, entropy, dream pop press, passages north, bedfellows, and the tiny. like a dog is her first book. she offers workshops through reinventing creative processes, which helps makers build more embodied, pleasurable, and emotionally safe creative practices.

Reviews

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using the epistolary form woven with excerpts from a hand written journal, this book asks crucial questions about sexuality, trauma, and dominant ideologies and feels urgent and vitally important. The prose is honest, raw, analytical, critical, personal, poetic. I felt intimately connected to the writer while reading and found myself reflecting on my own experiences of sexuality and trauma. The letters and journals move through and call back to one another. I am left with new ways of seeing society, writing, myself, my identity, my sexuality, my pain. This book screams and weeps and heals. I'm honestly grateful that a book like this one exists in the world. This book opens deeply necessary conversations and modes of thinking and being, and I cannot recommend it enough.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I confess: the pressure that comes with being the first person to log a book on this website is overwhelming. I endeavor to forge ahead with my review honestly but I hope that anyone who finds this remembers that me being the first doesn't make anything I say more significant or true. Go support Punctum - and, if you want, this book - anyway.

TL;DR - if you like this kind of thing, you could do worse than spend your time here. But know that what you expect is exactly what you're going to get, and for me, at least, there was nothing beyond just that.

This was generally pretty compelling! For a book I discovered scrolling Twitter and followed my impulse to explore (largely due to its eye-catching cover and generally trusting New Narrative as a worthwhile mode), it's hard to begrudge it the time I spent with it. However... no disrespect meant, but it's extremely MFA-ey. And so some of us have already left this a bit behind. Yes, it asks questions that intrigue but it's also so inundated with third-wave navel-gazing that, yes, while in a long and storied tradition of interrogative and lightly transgressive autobiography-as-poetry (intentionally avoiding "confessional" here due to the author's self-reflexive problematization of the label), doesn't especially land for me in 2024. Many of us have walked down this road before. Maybe that's reassuring, maybe it's frustrating, I really don't know.

To be clear: I don't think that being familiar territory is disqualifying. At the risk of being a little glib, this is the kind of work that needs to be written more than it needs to be read. It's very up-front about its origins as an academic project and perhaps I shouldn't hold it against anyone that I don't think it surpasses those bounds. I think any readers coming to this will know if the experience of reading it will be therapeutic or genuinely thought-provoking for them almost immediately. I hope the people who need it find it, and I hope the author continues working in a poetic mode, because the briefest and least literal parts of this book were the most interesting to me.

Also it doesn't matter that it would have been on the nose (it certainly doesn't ever stop Lars): this really should've been titled nymphomaniac. Embrace it.

[Lily Duffy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A honest, raw, aching, and liberatory book. Lauren Samblanet weaves an intricate, luminous web of sexual identity, desire, pain, and healing through the raw material of relationships - to friends, lovers, rapists, art, porn, dominant culture, expansive sexuality, etc. The body journals (visual art) interspersed throughout create a gorgeous, textural intimacy/breath pattern in the book. They're also a tactile reminder of the living, breathing, oozing body who wrote like a dog, giving the reader a felt sense of immersion in Samblanet's creative process. A must-read, especially if you're interested in sexuality/sexual identity, the New Narrative movement, somatic art, and feminist writing.

[Nevaeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book can be uncomfortable to read because of its various sexual themes but i quite enjoyed how honest and open the author is. i like how each “chapter” is a letter written to someone, explaining different situations, settings and memories. Lauren is comfortable in her sexuality and in telling some of her sexual encounters. i think more projects need to have more open themes, about sex and sexual abuse, especially told by women. not everyone will like this book but i think it’s moving in a way and begs you to confront your own sexuality and being comfortable in it.

[Saj · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is about as close as a book can get to being a body, screaming wanting sobbing wandering puking cumming in a bisexual, fucker, survivor, woman, lover, live-r kinda way