David Meischen's Blog, page 2

Aching for Touch

Let’s begin with a short poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect    The yellow bearded iris hides its face.  Not one stalk in dozens of green blades, not   one golden petal streaked with rust. It’s March,  it’s rained. Elsewhere in this town, purple petals   crumple, spent with pollen’s trip from stamen  to pistil. Bed after bed as bawdy   as bordellos. It’s not modesty  that blankets my own, but the red oak’s  generosity, beneath which rhizomes lie  like aging fingers aching for the touch   of light. I tuck my black rake, an octave wide,  between them to the blackbird’s song y tú,  y tú. A small gray moth, its sleep disturbed,   rises from the leaf pile in a blur of wings.     Cindy Huyser    Cartography (3: A Taos Press 2025)

Austin poet Cindy Huyser is a master of the closely observed moment. From the prize-winning power plant poems of Burning Number Five to the pages of Cartography, examining a landscape mapped by grief, Huyser all but disappears into the act of seeing. Poet and landscape, poet and moment, become one. Consider “Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect”—fourteen lines, an unrhymed sonnet, a world revealed in the space of 140 syllables.

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From the outset, words as simple as bearded and face acknowledge kinship between the poet and the iris she observes, between human life and plant life, vigorous with sexual energy, “bed after bed as bawdy / as bordellos.” And then this: “rhizomes lie / like aging fingers aching for the touch / of light.” I’ve been reading Cindy Huyser’s poems for thirty years, and I’m still surprised by the lightness of her touch, by how longing—in rhizomes, in us—appears quick as a brushstroke before the poem moves on. To my favorite surprise, birdsong translated—y tú, y tú—another touch of human longing: and you, and you.

I used to say that a Shakespearean sonnet—the hypnotic cadence of iambs, the musicality of rhyme—encapsulated the entire Elizabethan worldview in fourteen lines. “Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect” arrives some four centuries later, fresh as a woman’s brief time wielding a rake in her yard. The poet breathes in these lines. Her life is here. And the world she inhabits.

Mea Culpa

My blog posts are scheduled for the first and third Friday of each month. This one arrives on the second Friday. Last week, my good friend Tina Carlson and I drove from Albuquerque to Ada, Oklahoma, for the Scissortail Literary Festival, a yearly highpoint for participating writers.

About the Author

Cartography is new from 3: A Taos Press. Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems was co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Cindy Huyser co-edited Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016) with Scott Wiggerman and has collaborated with Dos Gatos Press and Kallisto-Gaia Press as an editor for the Texas Poetry Calendar (2009-2014 and 2019 editions). Huyser has an MFA in Writing (poetry) from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Cartography is available here ⇒

Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems is available here ⇒

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Surprise on the Oblique

Let’s start with flash fiction at its best:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  I Think About Ordering In   When I ask my father how life is these days with my mother,   a cavillous woman of cubist proportions and angled verbs, he   turns away, points outside to the tractor rusting among the beans   and radishes, tells me farm equipment has a half-life and not to   expect too much. I ask again, and he reminisces about the mail-order   bride his brother divorced, a Bulgarian engineer who lost her hand   in a skirmish and wore a prosthesis with a black leather glove. She   had an air of mystery, my father says, wistful as I’ve ever seen him.   And knew her way around a cabbage. He crosses himself, although   she’s not dead. And he’s not Catholic.    I hear pfffffft pfffffft, peek into the kitchen. Mother’s extruding rows   of green foam dots onto tiny crescent-shaped plates. An aficionada   of reconstruction in any form (never leave well enough alone! her motto),   she’s taken up molecular gastronomy. The froth looks like tubercular   spit.    I return to Father, rework my question, ask if he’s happy. A little, he   tells me. A sparkly feeling in my heart tells me so. Glitter pools onto   the floor, and he leans toward the sun in the middle of a luminous lake.    Mikki Aronoff  MacQueen’s Quinterly, Issue 26, January 1, 2025

Albuquerque writer Mikki Aronoff is an avid practitioner of flash fiction. Dozens of her tiny stories are published every year. Reading one of them, I marvel at how so few words can accomplish so much. The piece reprinted above, for example.

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In 203 words, the narrator asks her father a commonplace question—three times—variations on How’s life with Mom? Twice, the father replies by way of a non-answer. But our narrator is paying attention, surprising us by what she notices during moments when “nothing” is happening. A single phrase puts the mother before us. We can see her “cubist proportions.” We can hear the “angled verbs” that account for her peevish presence. And the father! I take much pleasure in the quirky answers Aronoff puts before us—“the tractor rusting among the beans and radishes . . . the mail-order bride his brother divorced, a Bulgarian engineer who lost her hand in a skirmish and wore a prosthesis with a black leather glove.” At second glance, I notice that his non-answers actually do answer the narrator’s question. After mentioning the rusty tractor, surely symbolic, he advises “not to expect too much.” His second non-answer references a brother’s disappointment in marriage—but also two redeeming qualities in the ex-wife, a way of seeing her that might explain how the narrator’s father sees—and why he stays with—his own wife.

A second short paragraph glances at the mother, at work in the kitchen. The narrative eye alights on images that leave a bad taste—“green foam dots” that look like “tubercular spit.” What story telling accomplishes here is so much more than just ambiance by way of details. What we see is how the narrator views her mother—who the mother is—at this particular moment, to this particular daughter.

I write short stories, and I’ve had considerable success seeing them published. But my shortest successful story runs to just over 1200 words. Reading a flash fiction such as “I Think About Ordering In,” I experience envy attack. And the surprise of a complete narrative experience in the space of two or three minutes of my time.

About the Author

Mikki Aronoff writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. Her work has been long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. She has a story published in Best Microfiction 2024 and one forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2024.

“I Think About Ordering In” is available here ⇒

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Kinship’s Thorny Heart

Let’s begin with a poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  My grandfather teaches me how to flay the heart     It was considered ritual in our family.  The cleaning of the spiny thistle.     A passing   of tradition and knowledge.     The confidence   that one could handle the blade, as well as the spine.    Catarina, my grandfather calls, questo ѐ come ѐ fatto.  This is how it’s done.    And with thorny heart in one hand   and blade in the other    he teases apart  the layers, each leaf nested tight within the next.    The spiny thorns grow sharper with progression toward the heart.    He left his heart in the sandy soil of his Sicilian hill town home  the day he boarded the ship that would take him west across the sea.    Sitting at his kitchen table, he passes me the layered heart and gives   strong warning: never leave a single thorn in place.    A teasing out, a gentle splay.    My grandfather’s hand on mine.   His shoulder solid for me to lean on.    A stone wall built around a small village.    ~ Katherine DiBella Seluja

Point of Entry, Katherine DiBella Seluja’s 2023 poetry collection, features a strand of barbed wire on the cover, the points of the single barb jutting prominently. Fifty-three poems follow, each one reminding us what barbed wire symbolizes as a challenge to new arrivals, whether from across our southern border or, as in the case of this author, from the Italy of her ancestors. “My grandfather teaches me how to flay the heart” is among the finest of Seluja’s ancestral poems.

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At first encounter, this poem’s title intrigued me—the mystery. What will the grandfather’s lesson be? What kind of heart laid open? What sharp tool employed? Two lines in—“the cleaning of the spiny thistle”—and we have an answer. The poet’s grandfather is teaching her how to prepare an artichoke for the table, how safely to get to the tender heart of “the spiny thistle.”

The surprise here lies in the union of surgical precision and meticulous, loving care, as “with thorny heart in one hand / and blade in the other // he teases apart / the layers, each leaf nested tight within the next.” This heart is well-protected: “the spiny thorns grow sharper.”

Seamlessly, the poem shifts from artichoke to grandfather, from one kind of heart to another: “He left his heart in the sandy soil of his Sicilian hill town home,” bringing artichoke knowledge with him, heart knowledge passed along to his granddaughter, “A teasing out, a gentle splay.”

Kinship breathes at the heart of this poem, strength in a “grandfather’s hand on mine. / His shoulder solid for me to lean on.” And the poet’s closing metaphor for the strength of kinship: “A stone wall built around a small village.”

The poems of Point of Entry are necessary poems, these days more than ever.

About the Author:

Katherine DiBella Seluja is a pediatric nurse practitioner. A resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, she is the author of a prior book of poems, Gather the Night.

Point of Entry is available here ⇒

Gather the Night is available here ⇒

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The Neighborhood We

For my seventy-fifth birthday, at the close of 2023, my good friend Debra Monroe gave me a copy of Scott Blackwood’s We agreed to meet just here, winner of the 2007 AWP Award Series in the Novel. I opened the first page, reached the last page in a matter of hours, turned back to page one, and read this little jewel of a novel a second time.

Surprise greets me in Blackwood’s introduction to the Deep Eddy neighborhood just north of the Colorado River in Austin, Texas. Pleasant surprise. The neighborhood introduces itself in first-person plural—the voices of a community speaking as one, as we, acquainting me with a cast of characters I want to know, immersing me in a community ethos:

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published   . . . we think of deer we sometimes still see along our greenbelt  standing in groves of cedar, motionless, testing the air. . . . we   can feel the morning-dark quiet of our houses just before the  children wake up, just before our hearts are gripped with doubt.

This is Blackwood’s opening chapter: five pages of a neighborhood speaking. Turn the page, and we’re in a traditional third-person narrative, with the focus on a single Deep Eddy resident. Three pages of this second chapter, and we’re back to the magical we, as the neighborhood muses about one resident:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  If you had lived long on our street, and drunk late at our parties,  you would know that before retiring and moving to Texas, Odie  Dodd had been a government physician in Georgetown, Guyana.   Squawking through the hole in his throat where his larynx had  been before the cancer, Odie would have told how Jim Jones  had asked him to the People’s Temple to vaccinate the children.

Odie is known to all in this neighborhood. Scott Blackwood summons them to move his story forward.

We agreed to meet just here doesn’t have a single protagonist. It has a plural, a choral character at center. As the novel develops, intermittently, these characters join to voice the story of their neighborhood.

In January of the current year, I read We agreed to meet just here for a third time. The narrative approach continues to intrigue me.

About the Author:

Scott Blackwood died on October 4, 2023, in Roanoke, Virginia, of complications from ALS. He was fifty-eight. Blackwood was the author of two novels, a short story collection, and two works of narrative nonfiction. His final novel See How Small was awarded the PEN USA Award for Fiction.

We agreed to meet just here is not readily available, but used copies are out there. It is a deeply rewarding read—well worth searching for a used copy in good condition.

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What a Risk to Love

Here’s a poem for you:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Dark Praise  My sister had to cut off her breasts. My daughter   asks for a new pancreas. I may be a fool  to believe in goodness. What a risk to love  the soldier who tells me he was hauling ass   when a girl ran in front of his tank. He can’t  sleep. I can’t sleep. I can’t shake the sound   he said her body made. My sister   is a whole new you. She changed her hair,   her name, and she looks good. My daughter  could go blind. We don’t talk kidneys   or transplants or amputated feet.   The soldier told me blood is unreal  on a windshield. He can’t sleep. He likes  to drink. I like to drink, too. I raise a glass  to my sister’s new breasts. Praise my daughter’s  needles, insulin, blood tests. I drink for the girl  who, if there’s mercy, never knew what was coming.    ~ Laura Van Prooyen

Surprise can arrive in many guises. One of them, it seems to me, is the shock of the unexpected, tersely delivered. “Dark Praise” opens with a gut punch: “My sister had to cut off her breasts.” No soft opening, no trigger warning. Two harsh family facts: disfiguring surgery, followed by the possibility of organ transplant.

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This poem arrives eleven pages into Frances of the Wider Field, a remarkable collection of poems about losses incurred over a lifetime—pages radiant with heartbreaking tenderness. Here, the poet dispenses with tenderness—in the service of blunt honesty. Straightforward declarative sentences, a kind of just-the-facts approach, leading to the poem’s third shock:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published            What a risk to love  the soldier who tells me he was hauling ass  when a girl ran in front of his tank.

Risk and love are important words here. There is risk in writing this kind of poem, risk in squarely facing what must be faced, risk in having a heart open to love. Empathy, too, in this poet’s blunt honesty. Witness how she closes:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published              I drink for the girl  who, if there’s mercy, never knew what was coming.

I think, perhaps, what I admire most about “Dark Praise” is that Laura Van Prooyen doesn’t let herself get in the way, doesn’t use language that solicits sympathy. Instead, briefly, she addresses three facts and then her own response: compassion for soldier, sister, daughter—and for the girl in the path of a tank. A reminder here, for all of us who write. There is value in restraint.

Note:

Frances of the Wider Field was a Finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of Poetry and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. Laura Van Prooyen is also author of Our House Was on Fire, nominated by Philip Levine, awarded the McGovern Prize and the Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Book Award. Raised in a tight-knit Dutch community just outside of Chicago, Van Prooyen lives in San Antonio, Texas. She is a recipient of an Artist Foundation of San Antonio Individual Artist Grant.

Frances of the Wider Field is available here ⇒

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A Portal Opens

“Two of Her,” from The Hungry and the Haunted, a remarkable new story collection by Rilla Askew, opens by quickly explaining the story’s title: “There had always been two of her, inner and outer, dream self and face self.” Un-named, the protagonist is something of an everywoman for the down-and-out spaces these stories explore. Nineteen, she lives with her arthritic mother and works three dead-end jobs. Her inner self dreams of escaping. Her outer self is trapped in a small Oklahoma town, also un-named. Her face self: regularly “cute and perky.” Her dream self: marinating in boredom.

At her babysitting job, this young woman puts two children to bed, then reads from trashy novels the man of the house has secreted in a bedside drawer. Until one evening, returned from an evening out, he catches her in the act. Instead of driving her home, the man parks in an isolated spot and asks her to describe a scene from her reading while he pleasures himself in the dark car.

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Everywoman calls the man a creep, steps out of the car, and walks to a local bar, where the narrative moves into a mystic space that is both outer and inner, as the protagonist’s hold on her face self gives way to a confused dream self. A strange young woman takes the adjacent bar stool and speaks to our young woman about a past they supposedly have in common, though the protagonist has no matching memory. Jarringly, the stranger knows about “that creep in the station wagon,” knows what everywoman is thinking. By the time the stranger offers three wishes, Askew’s story has opened a portal of sorts—into a fairy-tale world turned upside down. Where are we? Who is this knowing stranger? What about the two in “two of her”? Has outer self lost control to inner self? Dream self escaped to wreak havoc with face self?

At this point I backtracked to what had seemed a purely incidental moment, when the young woman at story center noticed a neon sign flashing on and off against the night sky—slipper-shaped, for the Cinderella Motel. A clue here, to help parse the surprises this story has to offer.

I don’t want to explain my understanding of the disorienting moments that kept me absorbed, that hold me rapt on re-reading. You’ll want to read this story on your own—the complete collection, too. Highly recommended.

About the Author:

Rilla Askew’s novel about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in 2002. Askew's most recent novel, Prize for the Fire, is an historical biographical novel about the Early Modern writer and martyr Anne Askew, whose connections to Queen Katheryn Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, put her own life in peril.

I have not yet read Fire in Beulah, but Prize for the Fire entranced me, first page to last.

The Hungry and the Haunted is available here ⇒

Prize for the Fire is available here ⇒

About Narrative Surprise:

For thirteen weeks, I have posted weekly to this blog. As of today, I’m switching to twice a month. I will post entries on the first and third Fridays of each month.

BEST to all . . .

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Number Magic: Three

Here’s a poem for you:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  At Zero Hour  the bullring is halved   into sunlight, shadow.   In the darkness   of the tunnel,   a matador arches his back   in a suit of lights.   A bull rakes the dirt   with his black, cloven hooves.   On the lips of bottles of cerveza,   the flies, urgent with the smell   of death, lift their frenzied,   rubbing hands to the sun.    ~ Larry D. Thomas

I love tercets, love the magic inside the number three—the unity of three in one, as in the Christian trinity; the perfect symmetry of an equilateral triangle; the imbalance in love triangles through the ages. Anna-Karenin-Vronsky, Hester-Chillingworth-Dimmesdale.

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Consider this little poem by my friend Larry Thomas. Notice how each stanza provides a quick glimpse, a focus . . . and then spills into the next stanza, like a slinky walking down a set of stairs.

Bullring, matador, bull—a tercet for each. But not quite. The third stanza gives two lines to the bull—in perfect focus. And then a surprise, a turn. From the dryness of dirt on raking hooves to the liquid sensations evoked by “lips of bottles of cerveza.”

And then, the final surprise: flies on the rims of the beer bottles, flies smelling death in the bull ring, flies “frenzied” over the smell of blood.

Note:

2008 Texas Poet Laureate Larry D. Thomas is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Author of several poetry collections, Larry has received several honors, including two Texas Review Poetry Prizes (2001 and 2004), the 2003 and 2015 Western Heritage Awards (National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum), and the 2004 Violet Crown Book Award (Writers’ League of Texas).

“At Zero Hour” is available in Letting the Light Work, a new chapbook from Buttonhook Press. Available here ⇒

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Mockingbird, Tomcat, Squirrel

In the fall of 2006 (if memory serves), I had the unbelievable good fortune of a semester-long writing workshop with Tim O’Brien. At some point, O’Brien assigned Irwin Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” a seven-page story, mostly dialogue, during which a marriage is shaken. When I arrived at Shaw’s closing line, I thought immediately of “Say Yes” by Tobias Wolff, a four-page story, also mostly dialogue, also revealing a fissured marriage. I’ve written about both stories here—but not about how they affected my own writing.

Which is to say: I went to work on a man-and-wife story, a dialogue story, during which one of the parties says the one wrong word that cannot be taken back. “In the Garden” surprised me more than once, mostly as regards setting—the yard and garden of a household on the bluff above Austin’s Shoal Creek, September 1982. I wanted setting to anchor my story, so I began with birdsong: “The mockingbird trilled again, like an answer to the silverware Blake had dropped on the garden table. The bird sang out and paused, sang out and paused again. It was lovely in the garden—a hint of cool in September’s air, the afterburn of Connie buzzing in Blake’s blood.” I knew that Blake was gay and mostly in denial, gay and euphoric because his sex life with Connie had rekindled. I knew their breakfast conversation would badly destabilize them. I wanted their backyard environs to be as alive as the two breakfasting there.

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In the story’s second paragraph, a breeze snaps the umbrella over the breakfast table, Blake glances to the Austin skyline, and then—my first surprise—“Buster padded out of the yaupon hollies at the garden’s edge—a regal tomcat whorled in tawny gold and amber.” Buster, it occurred to me right away, was Connie’s cat, an un-neutered somewhat undaunted male. By the time Connie arrives for breakfast, Blake has a scratched forearm that triggers a friendly tiff between husband and wife. During which—my second surprise—Buster freezes in a hunter’s crouch while a squirrel chatters among Connie’s tomato vines. The mockingbird mimics the squirrel—my third surprise—and then I could see the story’s snapping point.

A roofer arrives to patch the roof. And complicate the story—nothing better than a third person to destabilize a situation. “Pretty as a pin-up,” Connie says—and turns the conversation to Blake’s history of staring at attractive men. One ill-considered remark after another, the conversation spirals out of control, Connie goading, Blake defensive, then adamant, then saying the one thing this marriage cannot hold.

Connie slumps on the lawn, deflated. Blake stands helpless as the roofer approaches. At this juncture the story wants—the story demands—something to express the tension.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  The moment arrived in a blaze of sunlight—the little squirrel yammering   from his perch among the tomatoes, the mockingbird dive-bombing like   a songbird turned hawk. Blake turned to a split-second blur of gold. Buster   swiped the mockingbird out of the air, leaped and snatched the stunned   creature in his teeth by the wing. Blake took one quick step. He delivered   a kick that sent Buster sprawling and knocked the bird flapping into the dirt.   Buster spun back in full hunting mode. Blake grabbed the tom and flung   him in Connie’s direction. She held on to her cat. The mockingbird fluttered   and flopped in a morning suddenly so still Blake could hear the whirring   of tires across the creek on Lamar Boulevard.

This moment pleases me because the sudden, unexpected violence, the triple surprise of mockingbird, squirrel, and tomcat intersecting, expresses the tamped down emotional violence Blake and Connie have ignited.

Look around, O’Brien said to us more than once. Discover what’s in the space with your characters? Use it. To which I might add: find surprise there.

Note:

Superstition Review published “In the Garden,” Spring 2011. Earlier this year, abruptly, Arizona State University cancelled the journal and shut down the website. I’ve posted the story on my website ⇒

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The I Forged

“meanwhile, dust devils” by Albuquerque poet Kristian Macaron is a very narrow poem arranged in three columns on one page of her short collection, intriguingly titled Recipe for Time Travel in Case We Lose Each Other. “meanwhile, dust devils” places poet and reader on the volcanic escarpment that flowed from the Three Sisters, fissure volcanoes just west of the city.

Macaron opens with “the first thing / to grow back . . . soft green / moss” that doesn’t cover “the roughed scars / the forging left.” I love the choice of forging, subtly introducing the personified force that myth credits with the rock-liquefying heat of volcanoes. Having mentioned scars, the poem moves smoothly to the body:

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  but skin  is skin  and underneath  this scorched  skeleton  I am still warmer  than other parts  of the world—

We’ve entered the poem through fourteen lines of anonymous image—placing us on a lava flow that has cooled enough to accommodate moss on the surface. And now the I appears—volcano personified, magma personified. But so much more. This I has been forged. This I is mythic.

The poem continues in the voice of the volcano to a breaking point:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  every part  of me is      fractal—

A vertical space break and then this:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  meanwhile, I  am still writing  love letters about  time travel  and pulsars  learning the shapes  of earthquakes  and ferns . . .

Effortlessly, the voice of the poem transfigures—from the I of the volcano to the I of the poet, from mythic I to personal I. Then, smooth as can be—“the prairie swarms me”—the voice transmutes again. And we’re back in the voice of the cooled lava flow.

Each time now, when the first-person pronoun repeats, I hear two voices in one. The poet speaks as lava flow; the lava flow speaks as poet.

“meanwhile, dust devils” is just the right, the evocative, title. I picture Kristian Macaron standing out on the West Mesa, a whirlwind spinning along the fissure scar as she muses over the tectonic history beneath her and then, given the power of metaphor, becomes one with the mythic power of the earth’s forge.

Note:

Co-founding editor of the literary journal, Manzano Mountain Review, Kristian Macaron lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her writing, inspired by this colorful landscape, explores tales that derive from connections to her Hispanic/Latinx and Lebanese-American heritage, but also her love for cryptids, portals, geology, and time travel. She has an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from Emerson College.

Recipe for Time Travel in Case We Lose Each Other is available here ⇒

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First Person, Interruptive

“The invisible mists were falling, fine as pollen, and soon everyone would sleep.”

Thus opens Sleepaway, poet Kevin Prufer’s debut novel, published earlier this year. Set in 1984, with the dystopian intimation Orwell breathed into that calendar number, Sleepaway is—yes—a kind of dystopia, quietly disturbing, a coming-of-age story as only a gifted poet could bring to the page.

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A pandemic of sorts has arrived—the mists of Prufer’s opening sentence—erratic, haphazard clouds that wrap all inside them in sleep. Most wake when the mists pass; some do not. Our protagonist is a boy called Glass, whose father has succumbed to indefinite sleep.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Glass had once been a normal boy who spent an abnormal  amount of time sitting in the middle school hallway because  he could not hold still. He just couldn’t. Every inch of his  body craved movement when he was at school.

This boy inhabits the realm of the best adolescent fiction, smoothly written, with much going on beneath the surface. Living with a “temporary father,” Glass negotiates school days and time with two friends, parsing what he can about the mysterious sleeps from overheard conversations among the adults in his life.

Most sleepers wake to report complete, dreamless cessation. Not Glass. His sleeps are vivid with dreams. Eleven pages in, Prufer reports on one such dream, the scene so vividly depicted I forgot Glass was dreaming:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  . . . a desolate town, an overgrown little park near the town hall,  the sky streaked with gray, a late-afternoon light, a feeling of May  in the air. It threatened to rain but it would not, and Glass and  Glass’s father and perhaps a hundred others were settling into  folding chairs spread out on the grass, because the show was  about to begin.

And then this:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  I was there with them, sitting just a row behind Glass and his  father, and when Glass glanced at me, I quickly looked down  at my program.

The first-person I here stops my reading cold. What is the narrator—Kevin Prufer, I assume—doing inside the novel, inside a scene in Glass’ life? Then I backtrack a paragraph and . . . I laugh. The author-narrator has just appeared in his protagonist’s dream!

I had no idea what Prufer was up to here. But I admire an author who bends the rules, who writes the unexpected, who breaks the fourth wall, speaking from the pages of fiction. I thought surely the I would appear again, and I was not disappointed. It’s a rare appearance, not often enough to break the spell of the narrative. But periodically the I speaks again—tickling an observant reader’s curiosity.

I don’t want to spoil this surprise by telling you why I think Prufer inserts himself into a fictional narrative that doesn’t include him as a character (or does it?). I do want to encourage you to read Sleepaway. And to make yourself ready for surprise, no matter what you choose to read

Notes:

Recipient of five Pushcart prizes and several Best American Poetry selections, Kevin Prufer is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Fears.

Sleepaway is available here ⇒

The Fears—highly recommended—is available here ⇒

PSA: Please purchase your books from independent bookstores or small presses or online entities such as bookshop.org. Avoid the Big-A, which is in the business of putting independent bookstores and small presses out of business.

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