Many of the worlds inhabited by the women in A Bright and Pleading Dagger, the flash fiction collection by Nicole Rivas, are slightly off-kilter, highlighting how strange and unsettling reality can be.
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Dorothy Chan could take me anywhere—as poet, foodie, or allied traveler—and I would willingly oblige. Garnering every emotion from fear to revulsion to arousal, her debut poetry collection, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, celebrates being awake and aware in the places where one person’s past becomes another’s present.
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In Sherrie Flick’s Thank Your Lucky Stars (Autumn House Press), stars invoke gratitude, an awe for the infinity that floats just above our heads, and an appreciation for the strange ways in which life often plays out.
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You are standing in the middle of a room. A girl approaches, presses your hand, and says, “I want to tell you a story.” She does not get very far when another girl enters from another door. She skips up, presses your other hand, and says, “Don’t listen to her. Listen to me.”
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What remains once all but the essential is stripped away forms the backbone of flash fiction. In The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, Sarah Layden shows that the act of paring down to see what’s left can also expose the truth of who a person is.
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On the back cover of Tomb Song, Julián Herbert looks out from behind a glass window. The photographer’s reflection obscures the curves of Herbert’s face, turning him into a vague suggestion of himself. This image perfectly captures the elusive temperament of Tomb Song...
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Think on the name “Shia LaBoeuf” and a differing series of images may come to mind: the boy in a family sitcom who lives for nothing more than tormenting his older sister. The teenager banished to the desert to dig an endless series of holes with his misfit friends.
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As a monk may fast in penance, Stephen Florida wants his championship “bad enough to starve for it.” He has to be 133 pounds at weigh-in before a meet. He dines on broccoli and celery, allows himself to drink only “two allotted cups of skim milk.”
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It begins with flowers: roses and periwinkles on a christening robe that wither and fade over time. A procession of girls scatter lupins beneath their feet. The luster and color of the imagery in Wioletta Greg's Swallowing Mercury might draw comparisons to jewels, but the truth of this collection is far more organic, riotous, and messy than any stone.
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Friends. The ones you’ve known for years and the ones you just clicked with straightaway. The ones you feel like you’ve known forever and the ones you hope you’ll never forget. The fun ones. The loud, in your face, I’m-a-bit-mad-me ones.
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The festering pink eye of a needle mark on a loved one's arm. A grenade rolling to a stop at the foot of a coffee table. Small in stature but huge in their psychic capacity, giant in their ability to inflict our imaginations with the pain of an unspeakable past or a terrifying near future.
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Stephanie Ash’s The Annie Year (Unnamed Press, October 2016) has all the components of novels I like: strong, conflicted women, small town perils (lethargy, meth), youth that do things like ruin annual high school musicals.
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The truest physical expression of human empathy may well be to cringe: the grimace, the shoulders drawn to the ears, eyes narrowing or going shut. Cringing is an involuntary response to another’s humiliation or pain that reinforces compassionate connections with others.
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Something crucial to understanding the world of Kristine Ong Muslim’s collection Age of Blight is revealed in its wonderfully weird story “Zombie Sister.” Once clinically dead, the narrator’s sister, Beth, has returned to life, of some sort (the attending doctor is casual, commenting, “Every family has one”).
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In a pivotal scene in Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars (Burlesque Press, 2015), the ten-year-old narrator flips through a children’s illustrated guide to the Bible to find several pages stapled closed.
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Beth Gilstrap’s I Am Barbarella (Twelve Winters Press, 2015) opens with a Carson McCullers quote: “I am not meant to be alone, and without you, who understands.”
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The standards for near-and-post-apocalyptic Americana have risen, not least of which because the past two years have offered a surfeit of quality world’s end fiction with 2014’s bestselling Station Eleven and, this year, the more rarified In the Country of Ice Cream Star and Find Me available for pickup.
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His most recent collection, Chapel of Inadvertent Joy, displays a Jeffrey McDaniel as potent as ever, despite its contending with the various declines of middle-age and a love wrecked by infidelity. The poems in this collection, like in his other books, have a habit of sneaking up and biting you, making for a surprising and invigorating experience.
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There’s nothing like a death to bring the complexities of dysfunctional families into bold relief, and the Barrs of West Virginia are no exception. When Steve, the eldest of three brothers and a diagnosed schizophrenic, dies of a heart attack, Mark, the youngest who’s done some time in Bellevue himself, travels home after a long absence for the funeral.
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In her first full-length collection of poems, Some Kind of Shelter, Sara Tracey describes a gritty and vibrant working-class Ohio—a muscular, calloused and labor-hardened place that is reflected in the timbre of these steely poems.
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