Wild Plums

Literature & Fiction

Bidar, Patricia Q.

Contemporary

ELJ Editions

Poetry. "Ian Bodkin's haunted sequence, with its wounded and bewildered protagonist, Drunk, has something of the wordplay and tonal slipperiness of Berryman's Dream Songs. But the collection is much more than a mere homage. It is also impressive for its philosophical and semiotic reckonings and for a stance of stoical survivor hood that is ultimately the book's most notable accomplishment. This is a very fine work indeed, and a splendid debut collection."—David Wojahn

Every Word Was Once Drunk

Bodkin, Ian

Poetry

Poetry. This dynamic collaboration between Michael Cooper and Cindy Rinne hurtles through the male/female binary into the polyphonic, as the voices prism and ricochet past one another, multiplying in possibility. The trickster spider-god, Anansi, is spirit guide for this collection, at once postmodern and preverbal, as if the world rituals have been rent into fragments that ache toward the formation of a new web-text and textile, one which gathers all the lost, all rejected, orphaned and damaged, the repulsive and the lovely, to "reweave the world" to have "stacked the bodies looking for wholes where their souls peeked out." This is a poetry that invades all planes, from bureaucracy to myth, interrogating poetry's limits, even as it bears witness, unflinchingly, to what we have become.

Speaking Through Sediment

COOPER, MICHAEL

Rinne, Cindy

Fiction. Following Joyce Goldenstern's voice is like following a train of thought... that suddenly leads to an epiphany. It is a voice that takes us deep into ourselves and shows us what we are made of, convincing us that despite our failed dreams, we are normal with our "Ten toes. Ten fingers. Two arms. Two legs. Two titties. One head. One heart." And that despite, or because, of that one heart, we constantly struggle to "find [our] way back to put [ourselves] together again" as we battle with "the important questions of life." Without pretense, her stories take us on the pilgrimage of life, hoping perhaps that we do reach some understanding.

The Story Ends―The Story Never Ends

Goldenstern, Joyce

United States

Poetry. The poems in Jessica Walsh's HOW TO BREAK MY NECK are alive, visceral, and softly twitching. Each section beginning with different famous last words, these poems interrogate hard-hitting themes of purpose, mortality, and legacy with beautifully playful language. Whether discussing summer camp or a shark in a tsunami, these poems illuminate what it feels like to live, to be breakable.

How to Break My Neck

Walsh, Jessica L.

Fiction. INVINCIBLE SUMMERS explores the agony of family. The story begins with the death of Claudia Goodwin's father, and then plunges into the murkier emotional trouble that follows for years. Through the 1960s and 70s, the world around Claudia moves on. But her loss walks along with her. Gaines deftly manages that loss and the way it floats through time—not shrinking but morphing, not fading but fusing to all of Claudia's experiences. As the chapters progress through two tumultuous decades, they show how parents fumble their own children, how siblings abandon one another, and how people become itinerant and self-destructive. This is no simplistic tale of self- discovery, nor is it a dirge. It is, in Claudia's own words, a restless search for nowhere fueled by moments of whimsy, humor, and hope. I am glad to have read Gaines's fine debut novel and look forward to her next.

Invincible Summers

Gaines, Robin

Fiction. These patient, heartfelt stories of Midwestern life are shadowed by loss, by straightened economic circumstances (they're also, not coincidentally, stories of tenuous middle class life), by loneliness. And yet they also glow with an affecting and very human stoicism; their quiet desperation matched by a quiet decency amounting to hope. These characters endure, as their stories deserve to.

Love Letters to Michigan

Lasek, Christine M

Poetry. "She is not dead, but sleeping, Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke; like the sick girl of that verse, the speakers of Joanna Valente's sharp and urgent MARYS OF THE SEA toss and turn through a series of feverish nightmares that refract lived experiences into prophetic and wild new imaginings. Preoccupied with the consequences of mothering and not-mothering, these fifty-three poems trenchantly interrogate sexual violence and its aftermath, lingering at the site of trauma as though hanging onto the lip of an abyss. Writing becomes power, structure an act of bravery. Like an ancient civilization's first creation myths, these poems utter light out of darkness as they order a world into being."—Monica Ferrell

Marys of the Sea

Valente, Joanna C

Fiction. What a pleasure to read SHOW HER A FLOWER, A BIRD, A SHADOW. In story after story Peg Alford Pursell creates vivid characters and piercing situations. Nothing is too small for her imagination—a wren on a branch, a hole in a sock, ginger tea—and nothing too dangerous—a girl hit by a stone, a mother and daughter struggling. In a matter of a few words, a few lines, Pursell transports us into vivid situations of loss and longing. This is a dazzling and lovely collection.

Show Her a Flower a Bird a Shadow

Pursell, Peg Alford

SOMETHING DEAD IN EVERYTHING is a collection of flash fiction that explores the intricacies, intimacies, and strangeness of grief, in whatever form it may take; in it the reader is weaved into the fabric of everything and nothing at once--unsettling, dark truths meet the numbness we will all come to understand one day. "Stabile weaves together multiple vignettes with perfect articulation. Nothing is out of place, and everything packs a punch. The opening story, To Wash and Dry a Vessel, is an absolute banger that I will remember every time I clutch my morning coffee to my chest."--Tiffany Meuret, author of Little Bird "I could never have imagined a collection of stories so delightful about death! A girl with a mean stepfather composes a dream list of ways he might perish. A mother's ghost fills a Sudoku grid with 911s. A dead baker takes new form as a vengeful gingerbread man. Stabile's lively macabre inventions enchanted me with their comic hauntings and thrilling rage."--Polly Rosenwaike, author of Look How Happy I'm Making You: Stories Fiction.

Something Dead in Everything

Stabile, Lannie

Literary

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