Patricia Lockwood at the London Review of Books:
Who assigns our lots? What randomiser in the universe, what roll inside the cells? ‘One afternoon, from what seemed out of nowhere,’ Blake writes, ‘Molly offered me a gift – a tiny, battered pale blue on dark blue patterned Avon box with a gold bottom and two textured stickers of fluffy cats with long whiskers stuck to the lid. Inside, a tuft of stuffing on which sat two ivory dice small as the tip of a pinkie.’ She had carried it around since she was a child and wanted him to have it:
It felt like being let into a dim grey room with many doors, behind most of which I still had no idea besides the smallest sounds that might leak through – a hum of bees, maybe; the silent glint of sunlight against some sea; the low, slow beating of a heart; a little signal sent from somewhere secret laced inside her, just a girl. Sometimes when I’m uncertain what to do, I take the dice out and roll them, read the numbers. Just now: two, one.
The dice – we will need them – are a place past meaning. Roll them, but like Molly, they are a living spout of recombination; you will never come to the end.
more here.