Math Class

by Kelly Krumrie

"Somewhere in the gap between correct answers and questions that can't be formulated, girls are learning math. They aspire to seeing without taking notes. Girls go blind, do math, wage hunger strikes, weigh themselves, take field trips, do more math, eat or don't eat, crochet, sprawl, swim, imagine electricity, wink, fail to understand the meaning of a wink, take photos of each other, and think. Everything is being measured and tracked, yet something mysterious remains, flickering, at the edge of what can be analyzed, known, or even registered in symbol systems. It isn't yet clear what's been lost. MATH CLASS is meditative, fascinating, unnerving, a precisely rendered dream of a book, a wondrous gem reflecting mysteries and meanings wherever it goes."--Stephen Beachy
"The teenage girls in Kelly Krumrie's MATH CLASS could well be aspiring saints or geometers, with their transfigurative arcs and extremities, keen diagramming skills, shared visions, and acute bodily suffering. Can one chart an intricate web of friendships or unravel the track of a catastrophe? Adolescence is a vexed condition fraught with metamorphoses both terrible and holy, but these girls know how to plot the coordinates of their finite struggles and watch over one another with a sagacity that's as intimate and precise as the hand-drawn grid of a note passed secretly at the back of a crowded classroom."--Pamela Lu
"Kelly Krumrie's MATH CLASS makes mathematical thinking tender, charming, full of longing, and strange. This book reminded me of things I love--Georges Perec's writing, Amina Cain's, Guillevic's Geometries --but reading it was also something fresh and new."--Danielle Dutton "If I didn't know Kelly Krumrie wrote MATH CLASS, I would guess it was a phenomenological reduction of Madeline fan fiction co-authored by Raymond Queneau and Judy Blume in a parallel universe. Or an elaborate story problem from a geometry textbook détourning Lives of the Saints . What are the girls learning in MATH CLASS? That the body is unsolvable. That God and Euclid never answer their questions. That adolescence has happened and is about to happen but is never that which is happening. Krumrie's language proceeds via precise abstractions and marvelous mundanities, creating infinite new locations for the experience of anything at all."--Joanna Ruocco "MATH CLASS is a taut imbrication of storytelling and philosophical investigation thronged with a cohabiting sisterhood, at a place called St. Agatha's, where they are engaged in reflections on perception; bodily dissolutions and repairs; and the poiesis of logical operations of mind. Nothing abstract is alien to them. The institution is no passive setting of study, but instead a kind of aporia. Interleaved throughout this elegant speculative fiction are drawings that recall the recessive and delicate geometrics of Paul Klee. These subtle sketches chart a course for the story's alterity, glimmering with conjecture and truth-seeking."--Miranda Mellis Fiction. Poetry. Art.

92 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2022

Reviews

[CC · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to explain Math Class… I picked a copy of Math Class up randomly at Powell’s Bookstore, flipped it to a random page and was so struck by ‘Jo goes to gym’ class that I brought it home with me. This is a book that somewhat defies my abilities of classification. It pulls itself into seeming opposite directions, blending poetry and science, and story with fragments. I really enjoyed it but I don’t think I understood everything nearly as well as I should have. Speaking as someone with dyscalculia I never thought I’d feel so affected by anything relating to math terminology, or that math could be used to describe what it means to be a teen girl so well, I’d advise the math avoidant (like myself) not to panic at the name and give it a try. Very short read, but one that begs to be revisited and studied.

[Isaac Pickell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first reading of Math Class was all gasp and margin, carefully tracking the tightly woven “philosophical” “dream” promised by the blurbs on the back cover. But, as Jo notes, “this is sixteen” rendered with as little mediation as I’ve ever seen. The thing about math is that it’s already one, big, extended metaphor, a net splayed out to catch all mystery and put it in order and catch all order and pull it apart again. Kelly Krumrie lets her framing do the talking in a character study that approaches disability from the inside out. Another note? This book is un-put-down-able, whirlpooling you in and around and through the other side.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kelly Krumrie does a really great job at capturing a certain queasy feeling attached to being a teenager (and specifically a teenage girl but I can't speak on that quite as much) with these short smeary linked vignettes and portraits. A superb use of sparse imagistic language.