A Review of C.E. Shue’s Bridge of Knots (Gold Line Press, 2023)
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uttararangarajan
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan
Well, there’s always these knew independent and small presses emerging, and one of the most intriguing ones is Gold Line Press, based out of my alma mater, the University of Southern California (USC). Here, I am reviewing C.E. Shue’s Bridge of Knots, which came to my attention because it won a competition judged by Matthew Salesses, whose prose I have always admired. Salesses has also written shorter prose fiction closer to the novella and novelette form, which is paralleled on Shue’s Bridge of Knots. Shue’s work really reads as a hybrid in that there is a strong poetic quality to the writing. It’s not told in a strictly linear fashion and what we get are tightly woven-vignettes that follow a character through various meandering journeys, events, and musings. The description that Salesses provides is pretty spot on: “BRIDGE OF KNOTS is a pandemic story that is not about the pandemic. It is a book of character-revealing sentences, of displacement, of humor. It is a book about what it is like to live in the world today, both in a communal sense and in an individual sense--in other words, what is it like to live in this body, in this family, in these circumstances? Through reading this story, I came to understand myself better. What more can a reader ask for?”
One grounding mechanism for the book is certainly the pandemic, but much of the work eschews major timeline markers, even though we know the book is set in San Francisco. The chapters are numbered and are typically very short. Throughout we do get a vague sense of familial complications: raising children, being a writer, confronting life as an adoptee, and of course, the pandemic. The more impressionistic nature of this work seems very apt given the fact that it seems to register the warping of time that occurred as many of us found ourselves navigating a new normal during COVID lockdown. All in all, Chue’s assured, lyrical prose makes us want a fuller-length work, so we’ll wait to see what she has cooking for us. In the meantime, do check out Gold Line Press (link below).
Buy the Book Here
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