“Erika Eckart’s The Tyranny of Heirlooms is itself ‘magical material,’ a meditation on the necessity for escape, the impossibility of escape, and maybe, ultimately, ‘the illusion of escape’ that salves and saves us all. Equal parts a ‘hope chest’ and a list of regrets, the book burgeons with the accumulations of lives which are always ‘much more than…could ever fit inside.’ Eckart, then, brings those accretions outside in all their poverty and persistence. Her narrators know we ‘can’t start fresh all the way from scratch,’ so they are offered the next best thing: brute sequences of sustenance, always a day late, a dollar short, but somehow complete.” - Nicole Matos
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