Review by Kevin Brown
In her collection of essays, I Want to Burn This Place Down, Maris Kreizman doesn’t hide her purpose, stating in the introduction that she has moved further to the political left, and each of these essays ties to that idea in some way. However, rather than writing ideological jeremiads, she uses her personal experiences and her reading of culture to show the problems with America’s move to the right and how a move to the left would be more humane and beneficial.
In “Copaganda and Me,” for example, she writes about the television shows and movies she and her brothers watched when she was younger: Miami Vice, CHiPs, and Police Academy. She excavates what that media taught them about the police and their relationship to the public, contrasting that portrayal with what her experiences in life, such as “stop-and-frisk” laws in New York and George Floyd’s murder, have shown her. Her two brothers become police officers, while she moves in the other direction, protesting police actions; she loves her brothers, but she’s unable to talk to them about politics.
Kreizman circles back to healthcare in several essays, such as the first essay “She’s Lost Control Again” and “I Found My Life Partner (and My Health Insurance) Because I Got Lucky.” In that first essay, she talks about her struggles with Type 1 Diabetes. While she spends significant time talking about trying to keep her blood glucose numbers where they should be, that leads her into an exploration of insulin costs and the ways the healthcare system fails people. In the latter essay, she focuses on healthcare more directly, arguing that nobody should have to rely on luck or marriage to have healthcare, an idea she complicates by pointing out that she’s reliant on her husband for it, taking away some of her freedom/independence.
The weaving of the personal and political works well to remind readers that those two are always cojoined, no matter what politicians argue. She shows readers again and again that policies affect people’s day-to-day real lives because they affect her real life, as they do all of ours. Such an approach is more convincing and more moving than another political screed, so one hopes readers will take note of the effects that political actions have on Kreizman and so many more.
I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman. Ecco, July 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
