Every Sentient Being
after Frannie Lindsay
The carcasses have been piling up
All fall—atrophied chipmunk splayed under our kitchen island,
Every Sentient Being – after Frannie Lindsay
In the Realms of the Unreal
The vastness of their connection, their love (or at least his love for her) is so big, that it causes the earth to open. All of the other humans on earth die and some of the animals die. But somehow everyone knew this would happen.
The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien
What if a war criminal appeared in your town and passed himself off as a poet and holistic healer? What if your town was a small isolated place and the man is handsome in a brooding mysterious way? It could happen that he would be secretly sought after by women with private troubles and conned into trusting him to the point of intimacy. So does the incredible Edna O’Brien imagine how this would play out.
Disconnect
But my Pa is getting old, worked up and about to die. Everyday he lies on the raffia-woven lounge in the patio, beckoning on death to come. When the frightened voice of my sister; Ada, begs him to come into the main house he would say; “Death is coming for me, I don’t want to give it a hard time finding me when it comes.”
At the Bend in the Old Highway
The old highway stretched relentlessly in both directions from the bend, disappearing into the heat haze–not that it did Howie any good. He hated both the damn highway and the lousy filling station, but he was stuck there, like the monster centipede he’d once run through with the tip of his hunting knife, nailing it to the back porch floorboard, its legs wriggling like hell but going nowhere.
Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta
Michiko Kakutani and I have one thing in common. We both think Dana Spiotta is all that as an author. The illustrious critic has called her “wonderfully gifted” in her review of Lightning Field; declared her second novel, Eat the Document “stunning”; and described her as “immensely talented” for Stone Arabia. I am in complete agreement with all those accolades. Since I don’t review for the New York Times, I can be even more personal and say that every one of her novels resonates with the life I have led as an aging free-love hippy with feminist leanings and an artistic bent. Like Dana Spiotta’s characters, I have never achieved any assured success and have suffered from successive identity crises.