DIRT is a collection of essays written by a variety of authors on their own experiences with keeping (or not keeping) house. Some are subject specific, only talking about the battle with dust, or the obsession with a vacuum cleaner. While other stories talk about the purpose of cleaning in general, or a lack thereof.

As an individual personally obsessed with cleaning, I anticipated loving this book. However, I was unfortunately disappointed. Maybe it was the fact that most stories revolved around not being able to keep a clean house, which with my OCD naturally made me squirm. But I think the stories were somewhat lackluster and only a few stood out to me. ( )

I usually have good luck with Seal Press anthologies but very few of these pieces really stood out, in either subject matter or style. I wasn't expecting quite so many discussions of the connection between housekeeping and mental illness and those tended to all mush together to boot. A decent number tying cleaning habits (or lack thereof) back to childhood and relationship to parents, but not as many as I expected addressing the feminism angle (the Rebecca McClanahan essay on that was quite good, though) or environmentalism (Pamela Paul was the one example and mostly lost me when she claimed middle class people in the 70s could easily afford live-in help). Unexpectedly, the discussions of cleaning and race were most engaging, even though they were the furthest from my own experience. In large part because they seemed to have the strongest writers. Louise Rafkin's account of cleaning the homes of others was my favorite, and it introduced me to an interesting poet, Naomi Shihab Nye. ( )