Popi Laudico's Shaw Boulevard combines photography with lyric essays for an emotionally moving journey through the past. Like everyone's, Laudico’s past is a complicated affair. Parents seem peculiar on the rare occasions when they're together—“Grownups,” Laudico writes, “needed to take turns being with their kids”, and home addresses seem permanent until they're not. The naïve narrator registers events, the photographs capture details, the reader feels the pain. But in Laudico's handling, childhood is also a place of wonder—trees talk, monsters live in closets, and cars change color overnight. Like dark chocolate, Shaw Boulevard is a bittersweet experience, irresistible, but best consumed in small servings. With this short, sharply observed memoir, a marvel of restraint, Laudico makes the portions exactly the right size.
- Tim Tomlinson
Popi Laudico captures, not just the sights, but the smells, the tastes, and, most significantly, the feel of that vanished season, and its mysteries... still unexplained, after all these years.
- Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo