Seasons of Purgatory by Shahriar Mandanipour- Translated by Sara Khalili

By g emil reutter

In Seasons of Purgatory, Mandanipour writes of life in the Theocratic Republic of Iran. His character development and plot development is fresh in each short story.  Woven through are stories of defiance, front line war, a judgmental village, the taking of a daughter and belittlement of the father.

We meet Mr. Farvaneh in the story Shadows of the Cave. A defiant man who still wears a tie when he visits his wife’s grave. He also maintains a library and a fascination with the animals at the zoo across the street from his apartment. He is also the glue that holds his building together until the end when as in life it really doesn’t matter. Mandanipour brings us to the backward town of Guraab in the story Shatter the Stone Tooth. The narrator is there to help bring some education to the people of the town, yet he spends most of his time in a cave with a stone carving on the wall and a wild dog. The story progresses quickly as the town turns on him and in mass attempt to kill the dog in various barbaric attempts symbolizing the conflict between the man and dog and the town for one is urban and the other rural.  The title story, Seasons of Purgatory, brings us to the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war. Primarily the Iranian soldiers and their commanders who sit above a valley that is no man’s land. Mandanipour captures the violence, disregard for human life as an abandoned Iraqi soldier long dead leans on a rock formation as animals feed on him, bullets strike him and howls fill the valley.

King of the Graveyard tells the story of a husband and wife in search of their son and his unmarked grave in the local cemetery. They search for years, envy those with marked graves unable to grieve for their son. The son killed for opposing the revolution, shot down in the street and dumped in an unmarked grave so the family would be deprived of grieving.  Another couple have a son taken and disposed of and then in horror learn their daughter had been taken and raped, those rapists respond and give the father sweets pretending to be groomsmen. Heartbreaking as the father feigns celebration, dancing in the street.  The story Seven Captains brings a philanderer back to town twenty some years after his married lover was stoned to death for their relationship. It is an excellent example of love and betrayal on many levels throughout the story.

In these tales of collective and individual violence; of boredom, brutality of war and religion; love and loss; Mandanipour establishes himself as a gifted, well-crafted story teller. Seasons of Purgatory is a must read for lovers of the short story. The translation by Sara Khalili to English captures the intensity and vibrancy of Mandanipour’s stories.

You can buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Seasons-Purgatory-Shahriar-Mandanipour/dp/1942658958

g emil reutter is a writer of stories, poems and occasional literary criticism. He can be found at:  https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/

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House on the Edge of Town and Other Stories Just Released by Alien Buddha Press

Alien Buddha Press has just released, House on the Edge of Town and Other Stories by g emil reutter. This short story collection is his first release of fiction since 2014. The book is available at this link:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1651393575/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1578180105&refinements=p_27%3AG+Emil+Reutter&s=books&sr=1-1&text=G+Emil+Reutter

 

What others have to say about House on the Edge of Town and Other Stories

“g emil reutter is the real deal. The authentic voice of weird and wild America. reutter’s stories are vivid and unforgettable. His prose is dazzling”

                                    – James Vincent, editor In Shades Magazine.

                                    – Marina Esmeraldo, creative director In Shades Magazine.

“Tight. Real. This is how g emil reutter solves the style of melodrama in House on the Edge of Town and Other Stories—with a huge dose of insight for those who fall through life and those who barely escape. Even if they are to blame in this world of blame, House on the Edge of Town and Other Stories will make you wonder how in one paragraph, or one page, or barely more than three, you are absorbed to the point of forgetting you are reading a story, the verisimilitude so real you might consider these characters could live on the next block over, that is, if you are observant enough to care. But you care about the women and men in these stories who barely scrape by, and you don’t forget them. g emil reutter tells it like it is. House on the Edge of Town and Other Stories is one of a kind.”

Sandra Fluck, editor The Write Launch Literary Magazine- bookscover2cover, LLC 

“Life jumps off the page and kicks you in the face. Its bitter taste blends with slight optimism, turning you into the right direction. reutter gives you life as it is, without makeup or glitter and leaves you to think over what is and what could be.”

Roxana Nastase Author of A Churchgoing Woman

Editor, Scarlet Leaf Review 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1651393575/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1578180105&refinements=p_27%3AG+Emil+Reutter&s=books&sr=1-1&text=G+Emil+Reutter

Misguided Behavior by Leah Mueller

By Charles Rammelkamp

“I walked purposefully down the cobblestone streets, as if I knew exactly where I was headed. I’d figure out the direction as I went along, like I’d done many times before,” Leah Mueller writes in the story, “Leaving Bisbee.” It kind of sums up the narrator’s modus operandi throughout these tales. Subtitled Tales of Poor Life Choices, the stories are not so much about “misguided behavior” as they are about improvising with the less than ideal hand you’ve been dealt.

There’s a sly humor at work in these stories, too, as is evident from the very title of the book. Mueller can also finish off a tale of hardship with a spark of dry wit. Take the story, “Other People Ruin Everything,” a bit of graffiti she reads on the wall in a bathroom stall in a bar in Seattle. (“Hell is other people,” Sartre famously wrote in No Exit.) She’s gone into a bar she used to frequent, for old times’ sake, only to be waylaid by the other customers there, people with their own agendas. When she leaves, she finds a parking ticket on her car: the whole neighborhood has been gentrified since she was last there, along with new parking restrictions. The whole evening underscores the wisdom of the graffiti. But she concludes with the reflection, “On the other hand, most of us manage to do a damn good job on our own.” Hah!

In these autobiographical tales that span over three decades, we follow the protagonist from one weird job/situation to another, starting with her mother, in “Running from the Law.” Polly drives up to Chicago from Mexico with several pounds of marijuana stowed in the car.  She has a half-baked idea to sell the pot for a fortune – or rather, to have her daughter sell it for a fortune! (Later, in “Queen of Rage,” she will goad her son to steal a Christmas tree!) Needless to say, it doesn’t work out.

Then there’s the telephone sex scam (“The Lust Peddlers”), the pole-dancing in a New Orleans bar (“Nobody’s Prerogative”), life as an itinerant astrologer reading tarot cards, and in the soul-numbing, yet funny story, “The Clown Chronicles,” dressing up and passing out fliers on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for a sketchy outfit called the Education Zone.  The story begins: “An extended period of abject poverty led to my decision to become a clown.” She answers an ad that begins: “Fun job! Man or woman with cheery disposition and friendly personality….” Cheery? Friendly? You can imagine how that job requirement goes down.

It’s a life of invention, ad-libbing, extemporizing, as she gets blindsided left and right, and yet, she maintains a stoic attitude. “Despite my own hardships,” she writes in “The Other Side of the Cage,” a story about being stoned and lost in a zoo in New Orleans with her boyfriend, “I remained entrenched in the belief that my luck would change.”

Not all of the stories are about jobs, of course, but also about complicated relationships. The narrator’s dumped and been dumped by more boyfriends than you can keep track of, married at least three times. And then there’s that strange mother! Talk about having to make adjustments on the fly!

“People tell me I’m an extrovert,” she writes in “San Francisco Heart,” “but I don’t believe them. I’m way too fond of losers to be an extrovert. Losers are awkward, unable to play well with others. They’re my tribe.” Elsewhere she writes, “I felt infinitely safe with fucked-up people.” “San Francisco Heart” and the following story, “Leaving Ypsilanti,” are about a problematic relationship with a character named Greg, with whom she carries on an affair while being married to another guy named Roy. Yeah, it’s complicated.

In one amusing story, “Cities Where You’ve Lived, As Boyfriends,” Mueller mashes up these threads of romance and making a life for yourself (job, family, etc.). “Portland is your hipster boyfriend with a tongue ring,” she starts. Kalamazoo? “…the boyfriend who gets drunk, smashes your possessions, and steals your laptop so he can sell it to buy crack.” Then there’s Chicago, Tacoma, Seattle, where she ends with characteristic Mueller sardonic wit: “Seattle won’t even answer your calls.”

And where does it all end? Remember, this is a person who is confident her luck will change. The protagonist of these tales is an optimist, essentially, who refers to her “grim, Germanic sense of responsibility.” In “Time to Go, Grasshopper,” the narrator remarks, “I can sleep at night, knowing I’m not too much of a fraud.” Is there such a thing as karma for this person?

The final story, “The Sunshine Court,” set in 2025, depicts a rosier finale. The protagonist, Lola (mostly the narrator identifies herself as “Leah” in these stories, but Lola has similar attitudes, habits and outlook), a woman in her early 60’s, has settled into a retirement community in the state of Oregon that sounds too good to be true. Simpatico neighbors who look out for each other in interesting ways. A fantasy? A happy ending? You decide.

These stories are funny, erotic (“The Great Canadian Beaver-Eating Contest,” for one, set at the Burning Man festival in Nevada), insightful and brave.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Misguided-Behavior-Tales-Poor-Choices/dp/1989225241

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by Future Cycle Press.

What It Might Feel Like to Hope by Dorene O’Brien

By Laura Hulthen Thomas

Bootstrapping Hope

Dorene O’Brien brings exquisite art and unsentimental heart to the intimate character studies that illuminate her new short fiction collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, published by Baobab Press. While the title suggests that hope is the characters’ binding agent, the eleven stories in this compelling collection spar with the courage, resilience, and downright obstinacy of independent-minded people who refuse to let crises, quotidian hardships, or just plain bad luck whittle away at their hard-won idealism. Set in a swath of upper Midwest towns and cities, from upstate New York to Idaho, O’Brien’s cast is as varied and determined as her gritty settings. An herbalist’s “selective benevolence” includes dispensing tough love about the dangers of Cheetos along with her curative dandelion tea. A tarot card reader aspires to save Detroit from blight and casinos. An Alzheimer’s diagnosis leads a research scientist to find new meaning in the crystals he can no longer study.  Story by story, line by line, O’Brien reveals that forging our own destinies when circumstances elude our control is the collection’s real glue.

In the opening story, “Eight Blind Dates Later,” a commitment-shy auto mechanic who longs to re-connect with the ex-lover who jilted him endures a string of blind dates arranged by his mother. O’Brien populates the story with plain-speaking characters working as mechanics and call center employees. O’Brien deftly weaves the tapestry of these non-glamorous jobs as a backdrop to the ex-girlfriend’s attempt to re-invent herself as a glamorous romance novelist. When describing the ex’s oeuvre, O’Brien’s prose sparkles with vivid riffs on romance novel clichés, the best one being a racy plot line involving a lurid Christmas sweater. Sly humor abounds, as when Johnny notes of his ex, “She wasn’t the least bit embarrassed, a trait, I now realize, is not uncommon in romance writers.” Johnny’s failure to recognize his own shortcomings in one of his ex’s self-involved protagonists is, at first, played for laughs, but then gracefully turns Johnny’s eventual self-realization not into the expected regret, but a “newfound will to see the best in people.” The utility of willful optimism finds a beautiful realization when Mom’s final blind date reveals a future Johnny never dared to grasp on his own.

Other stories portray hope not as the brass ring up for grabs, but as an intentional practice for survival. In “Falling Forward”, a grieving woman finds new purpose by repeatedly bailing her drunken, ne’er-do-well neighbor from jail. The neighbor’s pet lizard, a tenacious, oddly wise creature named Little Richard, becomes the conduit for Faith’s growing admiration for Ed’s suffering. When Faith convinces Ed to release Little Richard from captivity, O’Brien’s deft descriptions make us feel Faith and Ed’s leap into fresh futures not as redemption, but a mandate to embrace “freedom in all its pain and possibility”. In “Harm None”, a woman whose husband is MIA in Vietnam pledges to live with her mother-in-law, the tough love herbalist, until her husband comes home. Both women come to share the belief that staying together to minister to their small town sick is the only way to bring their missing loved one back to them. The women survive both financial struggles and a loss of faith by building a successful herbal tea business that practices another of the collection’s themes, that “energy sent to sick people did not replace their responsibility for their own well-being but simply kicked their own healing into gear.”

Although the DIY approach to struggle threads through many stories, O’Brien also writes eloquently of how our bodies can turn on themselves despite our care and best intentions. At times the betrayal is humorous, as when Faith comes to understand that the recurring rash she suffers with her publicly romantic first husband means “she was not bursting from love, but from embarrassment.” In other stories, the body plays turncoat in heartbreaking ways. In the collection’s title story, a mortician who is “keenly aware of how a body can turn on a person without notice” learns that only by piercing his professional detachment towards these bodies can he feel the hope raw grief can bring. In “Honesty Above All Else”, Detroit is the body and the corruption that leads to blight is the betrayal.

Woven into her collection’s generous tapestry of minds, bodies, and places, O’Brien’s characters share one common past; they have all built their earlier lives on faith. Since hope once gave them the moxy to get where they are in life, the search to feel hope again gives these stories a practical and spiritual heft beyond the typical redemption narrative. In What It Might Feel Like to Hope, faith is not an ephemeral force, but the bootstrap that gets the job done. O’Brien’s insightful, beautiful writing and exquisite attention to craft do the same.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/What-Might-Feel-Like-Hope/dp/1936097214

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Laura Hulthen Thomas heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Witness, Epiphany, The Cimarron Review, and many other literary journals. Her short story collection, STATES OF MOTION (Wayne State University Press, 2017) was a finalist for a Foreword Reviews Indie Award.

 

 

The Liar’s Asylum by Jacob M. Appel

By Lynette G. Esposito

The eight short stories in Jacob Appel’s Liars’ Asylum are amazingly fun to read.   The 168 page collection, published by Black Lawrence Press, explores common every day experiences with life twists that both surprise and confirm the human condition.

Appel is a keen observer of people interacting with their life situations.  John Jodzio, author of Knockout, comments,  ”I am in absolute awe of Jacob Appel’s Liars’ Asylum.  The stories here are magnetic and knowing, funny and inventive.  Appel is a master of form—deftly able to conjure up pitch perfect characters whose lips spill out both truth and wit.”  I agree.

In the story when Love Was an Angel’s Kidney on page 120, Appel narrates the story of a young eighth grader fascinated with a high school athlete who comes to her father’s camp for youth who need dialysis. The story, in true beginning, middle and end short story form, shows how love can happen and end anywhere. While the young girl would give up a kidney for her innocent love when she is skinny dipping with him in the camp lake, her financially inept father is losing the camp to the bank and his wife to his best friend.  Her father never finds another woman for whom he would sacrifice an organ, but she wonders about her young love and if he still thinks of her.   She asks:   Am I what remains when an angel’s kidney evaporates in the past? This is an interesting concept when looking at love itself as it fades into the past but remains in the heart.

In Good Enough for Guppies,  the story opens with Divorce infected the air last summer and Appel sets the scene for old women (78) seeking love in a variety of places all told from a candid observer who once in awhile participates in the story by suggesting the relationship he has with his own wife.  The narrator, Gene, and his wife, Shelia, must deal with Shelia’s mother, 78, marrying a man in his forties with a Bronx accent.  Shelia is almost hysterical because it is her mother and Gene attempts to understand survivorship in a long-term marriage.  The story suggests and shows average people reacting to love at various stages in their life and how they react as well as judge others outside and inside the family.

Appel is a master of unique and inventive story lines that are well controlled, developed and meaningful.  He sets clear scenes with unique twists that help the reader see and understand the characters in more than one perception and in more than one dimension.  I enjoyed every story.

The book is available here: https://www.blacklawrence.com/the-liars-asylum/

Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University,  Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.  Her articles have appeared in the national publication, Teaching for Success; regionally in South Jersey Magazine, SJ Magazine. Delaware Valley Magazine, and her essays have appeared in Reader’s Digest and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her poetry has appeared in US1, SRN Review, The Fox Chase Review and other literary magazines. She has critiqued poetry for local and regional writer’s conferences and served as a panelist and speaker at local and national writer’s conferences.  She lives with her husband, Attilio, in Mount Laurel, NJ.

Thank Your Lucky Stars by Sherrie Flick

By g emil reutter

In this collection of short stories and flash fiction, Flick, displays her unique ability for seamless transition from urban to rural to suburban, often in the same story. Her use of metaphor and stunning imagery draws the reader into each story and unlike many collections of short fiction and flash fiction. This collection is like a fine quilt layered in a complex weave of unpredictable outcomes and character development.

She brings us Lenny the Suit Man who sells to millennials out of van, yet they are fine suits and his customers seek advice from the suit man. Flick tells us of the nickname, Sweetie Pie, in a flash fiction piece about infidelity that a woman bestows on her man when he finds an unknown sock in the his bed.

Flick writes in Birds in Relation to Other Things:

I remain in this small room. Her, it’s always dusty twilight. Our window pane is loose and cracked. It rattles with the breeze.

I talk softly into a coal-black phone after it has run twice. I listen to my voice. Reassuring. Reassuring. I put down the receiver.

You’ve gotten into an old car, a car in which you’re comfortable. You glance in the rearview mirror and drink juice from a bottle.

The birds have come to know me well. They trust me. They perch on my lamp, chair and ashtray. They are small and move quietly around my soiled clothes and hair, my dirty fingernails.

She writes of the polyester and plastic women of Las Vegas. And this from Pittsburgh Women:

When it’s dark, the women walk outside. They hear the clank of machines, the rattle of trains, the breeze tapping its way through every single tree. The women inhale with their hands on hips: they strike wooden matches to hold the flame to the fuses of fireworks, which pop and sizzle as they dart up into the night sky.

The story, Open and Shut, is about a young woman who moves from San Francisco to Nebraska. Flick in this defining story of the collection transitions from the urban to rural, from man to man, hipster to cowboy in such a seamless manner that the story flows like an uninterrupted breeze just above the stormy, gritty realism.

In this relationship driven collection she writes in the story, Snowed In:

So when he calls, leaving a message about forgotten coffee, he is already a thing of the past. The coffee is in the past—our morning, our voices, our life, it is back there in a different time. This time, on the other side, has little room for details.

In the story, Ashes, Flick displays her attention to detail and avoidance of cliché as in this passage from the story:

Up ahead, she sees red-black-and-flannel, someone in jeans walking along. Uncommon this early. Jocelyn has been studying the mosses and has strayed from the trail to climb a large rock with frilly, lacy green lining its top and side. Like carpet. She daydream about moving into the forest. Building a house that has trees soaring up through it and real moss carpet to dig her toes into.

These images as in all of Flick’s stories are fresh and relatable to the reader.

You can find the book here: https://www.autumnhouse.org/books/thank-your-lucky-stars/

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g emil reutter is a writer of poems and stories. He can be found at: https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/

Monte Carlo Days & Nights by Susan Tepper

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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Monte Carlo Days & Nights by Susan Tepper is a book filled with delightful short and short short stories that both entertain and amuse.

Published in soft cover by Rain Mountain Press, the stories take the reader on journeys that encompass the contemporary experience.  Of the twenty-two stories, my favorite is Adjacent toCentral Park.  Tepper sets the situation of two lovers in an upscale hotel room and all is seemingly going well as the reader sees the scene from the female narrator’s point of view.  Then—all is not going so well from the physical standpoint. How can one have sex at the Ritz Carlton in New York City and not be able to take a hot shower afterwards?  The man at the front desk claims there is a water main break so there is no water at all in the hotel  A freebie is offered for next time.  For this time, our narrator and her companion send out for baby wipes just as if they were ordering pizza to be delivered.  She claims she has used them successfully on a plane in flight. The language and circumstance of the characters is realistic and believable. While the situation is farcical, the depiction of modern life is serious.

My second favorite of the stories is Monte.  It is simple, short, direct, and yet reveals the different ways men and women approach each other.  This story is more of a vignette rather than the beginning, middle, end structure of a fictional short story.  As a slice of life amidst the other stories, it works well in revealing two characters circling each other n a relationship. The suggestive images of the hotel, the swimsuit, the hunger work both literally and figuratively. Do women consider going topless…yes but no.  The reader is in the female narrator’s head.

The final story in the book, Dinner, brings closure to the days and nights depicted throughout the sequence of encounters.  Our narrator, wearing a red spandex dress and no pantyhose, looks so “hot” her lover proposes marriage if he were the marrying kind.  How sweet, how ironic how no discussion of love or respect– just almost cold analysis with lust as the common denominator.  Trepper has a light touch on a subject where so many others write a long agonizing soliloquy on the “he loves me, he loves me not” boy meets girl storyline.

The 74 page book is an easy read sharing a contemporized voice with modern perceptions and situations.

The author, Susan Tepper, has been a marketing manager, a flight attendant, an interior decorator, and an award-winning author.  To find out more about her go to:

wwwsusantepper.com 

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You can find the book here: Monte Carlo Days Nights

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Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University,  Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.

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The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova

Review by g emil reutter

The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova begins with the short story Unstiching. Grudova lures the reader in with a line of normalcy, One afternoon, after finishing a cup of coffee in her living room, Greta discovered how to unstitch herself.  However, there is nothing normal in this collection of 13 short stories that stay with the reader long after finishing the book. There is a haunting darkness in all of the stories and a cast of characters set into miserable conditions. Characters transform in startling ways.  Grudova’s Waxy is a perfect example. It is a story set in the future or perhaps in the past. Women are subjected to training for factory work, supporting men, working jobs that scar them. They are used for money and sex, easily discarded. The value of human life is non-existent as babies are disposed of in casual and disrespectful ways. Everyone has to be registered with the government and if you leave your job or living arrangement they will track you down. A woman without a man is considered an outcast.

Throughout the stories the characters eat tinned food, have body disorders such as incontinence and anorexia. Most of the male characters have no loyalty abandoning family at will. The character, Paul, in the story, Mouse Queen, is such a fella. He is a philosopher of sorts and prior to his wife giving birth to twins, he takes off.  The wife abandoned turns into a wolf, raids local stores and once when returning home realized her babies were gone. Had Paul returned to take them or did the wolf eat them? There is a weirdness to each story, a surrealism that is haunting, grotesque.

The subject matter of this collection is thwarting yet Grudova writes surrealism well; in fact is a master of it. She has created a world no one would want to live in yet when one begins the book it is difficult to put down. It is not a book for the faint of heart for in its surrealism Grudova writes of the decay of society. I could not read the book straight through as I often do for after each story I had to ask myself: What just happened? It is a challenging read. Do you dare?

You can find the book here: http://coffeehousepress.org/shop/the-dolls-alphabet/

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g emil reutter is a writer of poems and stories. You can find him here:About g emil reutter

The Emily Fables

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Review by g emil reutter

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Reading, The Emily Fables, brings to mind several of Steinbeck’s works. There is a similarity in the use of poetic prose in these fables with Steinbeck. That being said, leave no doubt that Stephanie Dickinson is not Steinbeck like, she is forging her own road in these fables of love and tragedy, of the humanity and inhumanity of man.  She uses beautiful words and images that at times leave the reader breathless. For instance, these lines from Emily and Spring Cleaning, a chore performed millions of times around the world but in Dickinson’s fable she brings us this:

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In the lowest part of the attic under the eaves, I discover a painting. The walnut frame imprisons a black-haired girl seated at her piano, her downcast lashes stare sleepily at the single long-stemmed rose beside her. I stare, willing my broom handle to break the picture glass. Awaken the girl, whose gauzy green dress might be a hundred caught Luna moths. Her eyes blink, two emerald-winged insects. She inhales sweetness, the deflowered blood of the rose petals.

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There is the beginning of the fable, Emily and the Frostbite: The Hermit and His Woman.

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The hermit and his woman froze in the woods. There where the last pieces of sun were falling like long straws into the white trees, they washed their bodies and walked unclothed and knelt on the ground. Next to each other, but not touching. By dusk their nakedness had taken on a blue sheen, the lovers’ flesh not unhappy to be ice-hard like rocks from a forming star.

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Dickinson writes of the plaque of Diphtheria in the fable Emily and the Strangling Angel.  Annie is afflicted.

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They won’t let her into the sick room for fear of her catching the bull-neck. Diphtheria, the strangling angel of children, hover over the bed. Annie’s throat is closing and the bluish membrane on her tongue spreads over her tonsils and pharynx. She no longer speaks and is silent like a tree whose thrushes and wrens have fled. Her eyes try to talk, to hold back the room that is slipping away, the carved crescent moon with its thimble-size staircase that leads to a star. Dark blue eyes, blueberries picked before ripening, eyes blue as ruffs worn by medieval cardinals.

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Dickinson celebrates life in The Fables of Emily, the joys and tragedy, the beauty and ugliness of it all as a master wordsmith whose lyrically intensity in each of these fables brings great satisfaction to the reader no matter the topic. These fables cover a 61 year period. Dickinson an urban writer reaches back to her rural roots to deliver The Emily Fables to us and we are better for it.

 

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You can find the book here: http://www.booknook-eljpublications.com/store/p83/The_Emily_Fables.html

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g emil reutter is a writer of poems and stories. You can find him here:About g emil reutter