Numéro Cinq, Jason DeYoung:
The Deep Zoo is a seed! From this seed come our initial impulses and multiplicities. Our Deep Zoo is the place from which we dream. It is this place from which you came, the place from which you interpret the world, the place from which you create. As Gaston Bachelard, Rikki Ducornet’s favored philosopher, says, “daydreams illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected. In this remote region, memory and imagination remain associated, each one working from their mutual deepening.” The Deep Zoo galvanizes us. It is potency.
Heavy Feather Review, Allegra Hyde:
Ducornet writes by her own charges: there is alchemy aplenty inThe Deep Zoo. The collection comprises fifteen short essays, each of which offers up a roiling stew of subjects: from Werner Herzog’s film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser to Gaston Bachelard’s architectural poetics; Egyptian mythology to American politics; scientific principles to the author’s childhood memories. Ducornet moves between these facets of human experience with otherworldly grace, creating surprising parallels and associations. For instance, after describing the aromatic topography of Wan-Ming’s palace in China (“One found one’s way by smelling distinctly fragrant things that filled large basins set out in each room … The children never tired of inventing and navigating new itinerates blindfolded”) she moves into speculative metaphysics (“hyperanimation and virtual reality … that evoke and subvert known physical bodies”). The result is a kind of kaleidoscopic reading, one that mimics the natural movements of human consciousness. What we are given as readers—as guests in Ducornet’s own Deep Zoo—is an invitation to witness her mind at work: a chance to walk through a menagerie of insights.
The Star Tribune, Tobias Carroll:
The writings of Rikki Ducornet elude easy description. Her fiction draws from folk tales but takes them into stranger places, finding subtly experimental takes on narratives that at once echo and defy the familiar. The Deep Zoo, then, is a collection of essays on topics ranging from contemporary art to mysticism, as well as a meditation on society and certain ornate tendencies in fiction. In the title essay, Ducornet cites the writings of Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector and Italo Calvino; later in the book, she also will invoke the films of David Lynch. What they all share is a constantly shifting aesthetic and a disregard for narrative traditions, whether cinematic or literary. It’s this milieu that Ducornet seeks to explore.
Read more at The Boston Review.
Portals, Labyrinths, Seeds: A Review of The Deep Zoo, Desirina Boskovich:
The Deep Zoo is not didactic, but wise; not zealous, but possessed with great clarity of thought. It is simply a seed, willing to be planted on fertile ground and blossom as it is tended—and like the seed, it is mutable, shaped by its resonances with its reader’s own sympathies or secret impulses.