Sundress Reads: Review of Origami Dogs

In Origami Dogs (Autumn House Press, 2023), Noley Reid directly states, “I want to say the perfect thing but don’t know what that is” (44). This line sends me, and you have to read the book to judge how perfectly it encapsulates Reid’s precise balance between wisdom and realness. With a notable rhythm, the stories feel like illustrations of life events rather than contrivances. 

A noticeable accomplishment in Origami Dogs is the breadth of Reid’s storytelling. Her collection contains elements of magical realism, postmodernism, the pastoral, and teen dramedy. The stories each use a purposeful point-of-view–either first, second, or third–and there are commonalities between the settings, characters, situations, and themes. The plot movements feel inevitable rather than gimmicky. Origami Dogs reads like a collection of distinct stories that play off each other, rather than a litter of nameless puppies. 

Readers will relate both to large-scale topics like teenage anxiety and first love, and to smaller scale synchronicities, like when house finches appeared at my bird feeder as I read about them in “Movement and Bone.” Reid smartly crafts images so specific that the reader can find them in real life. 

Origami Dog’s dialogue is sparkling and realistic, like when Martha, a flippant nurse, interrupts an intensely dramatic scene with snarky job-related jabs. It’s easy to envision a nurse, walking in on a teenager facing up to the worst thing he’s ever done, and telling him, “If you’re gonna lose it, step out to the hall” (Reid 59). Not mean, but simply blunt. In a later story, a confidante telling an upset father to respect his daughter’s grief in a moment when he might center himself advises, “‘this is her sadness…Let it be hers’” (Reid 102). Reid captures excellent advice with such a precise thing to say.

In “Shepherd,” Reid’s language is lively and her descriptions crisp. As a poet, I love the description of a swimmer as a “finless porpoise” (31). The same narrator later writes, “I watch her and it isn’t like college, but it’s not like now either. It’s like an alternate plane, where she and I live…” (Reid 37). In context, his thought feels both accessible and personal, both knowable and paradoxical. “Shepherd” helped me understand a trauma I had been through. The story was more than simply a depiction of grief, with such a loveliness in its hills and the neighbor kid with a shitty nickname and the college sort-of-girlfriend who, in the words of Deftones’s “Street Carp,” has sharp teeth. The story is complicated, and its climax is an act of emotional honesty, putting a difficult idea into words. 

As our news cycle escalates toward the apocalypse every day, it’s ironically calming to read about personal disasters–not because they’re comforting, but because they remind us that our personal lives also matter. I don’t need another Marvel movie about the world snapping closed like a clam. I need stories where a girl and her neighbor set out to find a lost lamb. As someone who has had to find and catch a lamb after dark in the pasture of Sundress’s Firefly Farms, I can honestly say it’s dramatic! 

On the other hand, Reid also confronts social stigmas. In “Sick Days,” Reid writes about a young, queer-curious character, Sean, whose mother worries about him in a way that unravels the relationships around her. When his mother tells him not to wear a dress, his sister Amelia defends his preferred dress completely:

The narrator, Amelia, knows that his violation of gender norms is his best self. My queer heart burst for Amelia at this moment. And yet, Amelia isn’t perfect. Reid explores how all the characters navigate society plagued by fatphobia and transphobia. There are real slights, imagined slights, and mistakes made. Since no one is a paragon, all of them feel human. And no one feels irredeemable.

In Origami Dogs, Noley Reid builds a world where cause and effect are more than simply plot motivators. Read this book if you love animals, character development, the midwest, and/or good language. I don’t know what the perfect thing to say is, but Origami Dogs comes close.

Origami Dogs is available at The University of Chicago Press

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Joey Gould, who served as Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys. Joey is grateful to Erin Elizabeth Smith & Sundress Academy for the Arts for their support of their work.