Best Books of 2015: Alternating Current Staff Picks
FICTION REVIEWER: AL KRATZ

My “To Be Read” list is usually a few years behind, so I still have several 2015 books that I’m looking forward to reading, but these six stood out as my favorite releases of the year:

I have to go with a fellow Iowan writer for my first pick of the year. Descent, by Tim Johnston, is an exhilarating literary suspense novel about a family on vacation in Colorado, where their teenaged daughter is kidnapped while jogging with her younger brother. The novel covers the impact on all four members of the family and unwinds the mystery into an unpredictable, but perfectly logical, ending.

War/lock
LISA MARIE BASILE

Poetry
36 pages
5½” x 8¼” ribbon-bound, paper chapbook with cardstock cover and deckled endpapers
First Edition
Hyacinth Girl Press
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Available HERE
$6.00
Review by Michael Lindgren

This fierce and unsettling offering from young poet Lisa Marie Basile, by way of micropress Hyacinth Girl, is a harrowing depiction of a dysfunctional (abusive?) relationship, limned in verse of undeniable force and energy. An erotically supercharged exorcism, war/lock has a performative element to it that lends the submerged events of the poem a narrative arc. “I should have known the signs, my darling,” the narrator says ominously, early on; halfway through she can report, “I am getting stronger. / I am stronger than you.” By the end of the poem, she is “wounded / from oleander… I took to the heart / to be rid of you,” but able to say, “i no longer love you, / warlock, / & i take my bow”—the verse equivalent of the scene in a slasher film where the protagonist has finally dispatched the last monster.

The horror movie analogy is actually rather apt, for Basile’s imagination seems rich in imagery from pop culture, the gothic, and the occult. Motifs of conjuring, spell-casting, herbal remedies, black magic, dismemberment, shape-shifting, witchcraft, and other accoutrements of the unseen are woven through the book like dark threads. “Does this spell work on you?” she asks her tormentor, half-taunting/half-fearful; “are you jealous of me too?” The lines have the anguished, echoing rhythm of hot words spoken in anger or lust.

Indeed, issues of language and control also thrum throughout the book: “i cannot speak. because / I hate when you listen” and “am punished to be quiet”; later, “he made me / make these words / so they would kill me.” In Basile’s imaginative universe, language is defined as a weapon that can be turned against its speaker, but that also becomes the engine of the protagonist’s triumph and liberation.

Any work that performs the action it is describing—that is, that uses language to describe the power of language—is an essentially poetic operation, and in this, Basile’s verbal facility is well used. The verse has an onward-rushing momentum that suggests a spontaneous expression of emotion, but on closer examination, the formal qualities vary quite widely, from open-spaced free verse to mini-blocks of prose poem. If war/lock feels a shade overwrought at times, it does so in service of a fearless sensibility, one that is not afraid of its own heat and speed.

Of more minor note: this amateur connoisseur of chapbook design also found the deckled blue endpapers a pleasing touch.

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MICHAEL LINDGREN is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in venues such as The Washington Post, n+1, Brookyn Magazine, and many more. He lives in Jersey City.

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• The reviewer purchased it from the publisher because he thought it looked interesting. The reviewer does not know the publisher or the author. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

The Revelator
ROBERT KLOSS

Fiction  |  Novel
256 pages
5.4” x 8.4” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1939419507
First Edition
Unnamed Press
Los Angeles, California, USA
Available HERE
$16.00
Review by Edmund Sandoval

By the end of the first paragraph of Robert Kloss’ The Revelator, a band of mutinous sailors are shot through their heads and sent to the bottom of the drink, their bodies weighted with lead to keep them there. By the end of Kloss’ prologue, an unspecified island’s unnamed native population has been enslaved and brutalized, their resources pillaged, their way of life annihilated, crushed under the heavy bootheel of the same man responsible for the execution of the mutineers. Things don’t get much better from there.

Fast forward a few years and Kloss’ already-bleak world has not gained any polish. It is stark and it is hard and it is unrelenting. It is peopled by a hardscrabble lot of men and women on the bare edge of the new American frontier. There is violence, and it is ever present and dispassionate, as mundane as swallowing back saliva or clearing a bit of grit from the eye. Their lives are framed by a hardship that is raw and fresh. The excitement of a new life in a new land has been cast aside. They live in “constant and obsequious dread of the Almighty,” and in the shadow of the black mountain, which they pray and sacrifice to. At the fringes of their communities are unknown lands, forests where the hopeless hang lifeless from trees, natives keen on exacting vengeance upon these hordes of pale-skinned denizens. Life, one could say, ain’t pretty:

And when all faiths and tonics were exhausted they were found slouched against boulders, their heads blown out, pistol fallen to their chest, or they dangled from the trees, their necks rope burned red, and black tongues distended. So many gave up their flesh beneath His black mountain that medical students traded the graveyard for this forest when seeking fresh corpses.

It is on this fragile precipice where we are introduced to our unnamed narrator, our revelator. In scenes reminiscent of a fairytale, we learn of his first years. He is a child when we meet him, an orphan—his parents, we learn, murdered, and upon his rescue, he is bathed in the blood of his recently deceased parents. His keepers are a farming family. Of course, they are cruel; the child sleeps in the barn and is given the dregs as sustenance. Years pass, and the narrator grows. As a young man, he takes to the soil, the work, strong as a dray horse. From his post in the barn, he becomes enamored by the farmer’s daughter, a woman he cannot approach, due equally to threat, his own fear. It is during this lovelorn period when he is first contacted by the Almighty:

So in this way you laid the night the Almighty first whispered your name. And into the night you were compelled, into the forests beyond the farmer’s fields, as if led by a hand unseen, into the depth of blackness of the forest interior, where around you silent animals observed, until into this world the creature of the Almighty appeared. Now the fullness of its horror: veined wings and obsidian horns and hooves of soot and fur tufted legs, and its eyes crimson and shining, as if lit by the eternal furnace of His soul.

When the daughter of the farmer is married, our narrator leaves, rejecting the penurious life of his youth, the cruelty of the farm. In time he is taken in by an agnostic shopkeeper. He soon finds the debauched side of things, falling into alcohol and women and all things vile. While the specter of the creature of the Almighty is present, it is relegated to the sidelines. It is not until he has found a wife with the daughter of his third caretaker, a butcher, that things really get cooking, in a revelatory sense, of course:

... And as you lowered yourself against your wife, snoring or murmuring of the children she had birthed only to see die, you heard only the hum of those golden plates, the rustling of the Almighty’s creature along your floorboards, and through the blood crashing your ears, the thumping of your heart, you knew Him upon His black mountain, ever and ever again uttering your name into the faint and terrified reaches of your soul: JOSEPH, JOSEPH, JOSEPH, JOSEPH, JOSEPH, JOSEPH, JOSEPH, JOSEPH, JOSEPH, JOSEPH.

Those not familiar with the mythical origins and revelations and travels of Joseph Smith might do well not to investigate too deeply into the history of the man and his doings. This is, after all, a fiction. Though it is informed by the legend of Smith, it is not a history of the man. After some cursory research of my own, I found, much to my chagrin, that there was no mention of a winged creature that reeked of brimstone whispering revelation into his ear. Much of the fun, if one can call it that, is watching this seemingly average man (though fearsomely flawed) grow into his namesake of revelator. It is a spectacular ascension and one wonders: Has he been chosen? Is this the word of the Almighty? Is he mad? Does it matter? In a bold stylistic move, we experience each and every one of our narrator’s feelings literally, as Kloss has written his story in the second person (as was, I might note, his previous novel). If you do yourself the favor of diving into the “you” without prejudice, you will see wondrous things, you will see death, you will see life, you will see revelation issue forth like water.

There has been no shortage of kooks and charlatans and snake-oil salesmen selling the promise of salvation throughout the history of this country. There has been no shortage of blood spilling and horror-making throughout the history of this country, as well. There are ample doses of both front and center from page one to page end throughout this novel. Its depiction is unflinching and no one—man, woman, and child—is spared from the quieting hand of death. It is powerful stuff, and at times hard to reckon with. Yet this landscape, though framed through the lens of fiction, is true to the unbending will of those determined to survive when our slice of continent was still an unfamiliar land. That it is seen, to a degree, through the eyes of a prophet whose efforts are felt to this day throughout the country gives the book an extra and welcome dose of heft. With this book, Robert Kloss, at least in this reviewer’s opinion, has given us a worthy gift. It is well worth reading, carnage and all.

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EDMUND SANDOVAL lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in The Minnesota Review, The Common, Fourteen Hills, and The Mud Season Review, among others. He earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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• This book was sent to the reviewer from the publisher at the reviewer’s request. The reviewer does not know the author or publisher personally. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

Pitfall
CAMERON BANE

Fiction  |  Novel
332 pages
5½” x 8½” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1942266198
First Edition
WildBlue Press
Evergreen, Colorado
Available HERE
$14.99
Review by Al Kratz

From the first sentence of Pitfall by Cameron Bane, you know what you are in for: a page-turning, suspenseful, literary equivalent of a movie like Taken or Die Hard. “With a shriek of tortured metal, another bullet slashed by my face, tumbling, end for end, by the sound. Ricochet.” Pitfall isn’t a book of internal conflict—this is pure hero’s journey, straight into the lair, the moment of survival, the fight of good vs. evil. The first chapter begins with the hero in an impossible situation, trapped by the bad guy (awesomely named Boneless). Our hero is in a spot like Bruce Willis’ McClane without his shoes, like Liam Neeson’s Mills stuck in Paris with no realistic hope of finding his daughter. As the book takes a breath in the second chapter, we learn the story is being told by a former special-ops military man named John Brenner who will be hired to find a missing college student named Sarah. The enemy he finds is like no other I’ve read in books or seen in movies. It took me a week to read it, but only because I was on a personal non-heroic journey of getting my house ready for sale. Had this been a normal reading weekend, it would have been the kind of book I canceled plans for on Saturday, and then if necessary, did the same to finish reading it on Sunday.

Brenner is a unique character. He’s a former military man who led a group through a difficult and ultimately unsuccessful mission in Iraq. He has lost a wife, son, and daughter on the way. He is machismo, but he is an avid reader, a lover of movies and rare jazz and blues. He is a Renaissance man.

He is a realistic character but also a voice that takes a little getting used to. He likes his conventional similes and extreme metaphors. Brenner tells us of people who sound “as desolate as the back side of the moon.” A place is described as “busier than a fiddler’s convention.” A character he is interviewing has “sweat beading up and popping on his forehead like oil drops on a hot driveway.” Brenner concludes this man is “nervous as a whore in church.” When he talks about his love of classical music, he admits that “sometimes a hilljack can fool you with what he knows.” After a while, these sayings become classic Brenner sayings. I looked forward to them. I understood this was how Brenner related to things in the face of his impossible conflict. This was how he moved through the world. There is nothing unreal here. It may not be what I’m used to in traditional literary stories, but it surely is how a man like Brenner would tell his story. And above all of this, that story drives it all. We want Brenner to succeed. We want to find out what has happened to Sarah. We want good to win.

One of my favorites of the Brenner sayings had a funny echo of the recent Democratic debate where Martin O’Malley delivered a zinger, calling Donald Trump a carnival barker. “I’d just entered a dark carnival on a far bleak shore, and the mad barker had strapped me in for one hell of a ride.” Brenner is in a different carnival than a presidential election, but it shows how common, yet effective, these types of metaphors are.

Act two and three of the book are very effective. The true mystery that Brenner is facing is slowly and naturally revealed. The ending has a good combination of the unexpected and the realistic. There are no moments of tidy wrap-up—It all has a very organic flow. Even Brenner, himself, begins to change naturally. The way he describes things becomes smoother. The clipart comparisons are gone, replaced by ones more from the heart, more unique. He becomes more poetic at the end of his hero’s journey. Still, it’s the John Brenner way: “The slick dusted off, its noise like a million spoons rattling inside a thousand metal drums.” In a moment of peace, he sits outside describing that the “sky overhead was a ridiculously deep blue, graced with high, wispy clouds that looked for all the world like pulled-apart cotton candy.” I wondered if this smoother quality of Brenner was because Brenner was used to his journey and telling his story to the reader or whether Mr. Bane was used to the character and to writing him for us. Did Bane change Brenner or did Brenner change Bane? I suspect it was a bit of both? Either way is a nice effect of art and an enjoyable experience for the reader.

The story is not all external conflict. Just the choice to tell it from the first-person perspective showed Bane was interested in more from Brenner’s story. It makes the story robust. We never know what Liam’s character in Taken is thinking. We just know he is a badass that no one should mess with. We know Die Hard’s McClane can deliver a one-liner, but we get to know many of the internals of John Brenner. Even though his fight is center ring, the side rings don’t stay dark. We know his pain, his doubts, and his motivations. The last two books I read were extremely inner-conflict driven: Harry Crews’ All We Need of Hell and Amy Rowland’s The Transcriptionist. They are great companions to this read. It’s more enjoyable to combine these contrasting main character archetypes: the masculine, the feminine, the existential, and the pragmatic. There is room for them all and literature reaches its high watermarks only when this type of variety is explored.

The story makes another break from the traditional hero’s journey at the ending. It should be no spoiler to suggest our hero makes it out of the lair. His safety in the end is even more obvious when the story is in the hero’s first-person voice, but it takes another nice turn, by not just wrapping everything up tidy and then exiting. The pace throughout most parts of the story is very quick. Chapters are fairly short and often end with a little zinger, a taste of the rising stakes, and an appetizer for the next chapter advancing the action. But as our hero comes out of the lair, as he brings it all home, the pace changes. The last couple chapters are longer. They move slower. They bring you to a deserved ending, but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

GIVEAWAY FROM WILDBLUE PRESS!
PITFALL: First in the Suspense Thriller Series By Cameron Bane, featuring former Army Ranger and cop, John Brenner:

WildBlue Press is offering a free 8GB, 7” Kindle Fire when you write the most helpful review on the Amazon sales page or the review with the most likes on the Goodreads page, whichever has the most votes before November 22nd.

After your review is posted, please email the date, site, and a link to it to: info [at] wildbluepress [dot] com.

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Al Kratz is our Fiction Reviewer for The Volt. He is a writer from Des Moines, Iowa, an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel, and is currently working on a novel and a short story collection. He has had work featured in Red Savina Review, Wyvern Lit, Flash Flood, Daily Palette, Apeiron Review, Ardor Flash Fiction, 1000words, Gravel, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere, and he is the winner of the 2013 British Fantasy Society Flash Fiction Competition.

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• This book was submitted by the publicist to Alternating Current for a book blog tour. The reviewer does not know the author or publicist and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

Spotlight on Silver & Gold LGBT+ Anthology
EDITED BY AMANDA JEAN

From one-night stands to on-and-off love stories that span decades, the roads of love are diverse and have no map. One of the hardest relationships to navigate may be those with an age difference. Society isn’t always sure what to make of May/December pairings, and the odds seem stacked against them. But the wisdom of age and the optimism of youth is a combination not to be underestimated.

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AN EXCLUSIVE NOTE FROM THE EDITOR, AMANDA JEAN, WHO MOONLIGHTS AS ALTERNATING CURRENT’S LGBT+ DIRECTOR:

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The origin story for Silver & Gold begins in late 2013, at the first Gay Romance Northwest meet-up in Seattle. I attended, along with the owners of Less Than Three Press, where I’m a senior editor. During the book fair, I had a rum and Coke, or several, and talked shop with Samantha Derr, LT3’s Managing Editor. We got onto the subject of upcoming calls, and the idea of a May/December anthology popped into my head fully formed and seemed like A Really Good Idea. Who doesn’t love a good May/December flavor to their romance? What could be better than a collection of May/December romances, highlighting the unique challenges and rewards in age-difference pairings? I said as much to Samantha, and she said something vague about checking the slate, so obviously the only thing to do was start a mild campaign of harassment that ultimately ended in a “PLEASE LET ME DO THIS” email. Luckily, LT3 is a benevolent force, and gave in.

Fast forward to October of 2015, and Silver & Gold is out in the world, not just an amorphous concept in my own head. Over the last year and change, I read dozens and dozens of amazing stories submitted, painfully whittled them down to a selection of six, edited for truly talented and accommodating authors, nitpicked my way to narrowly making the deadline—and now there’s nothing left to do but to sit back and take stock. I’m proud of what we accomplished. I wanted to reflect as much of the LGBTQ acronym as possible: though I love the genre, it is very much dominated by a certain letter. I’m happy to say that the book reflects some of the truly colorful lives and loves of the community. Also, there’s werewolves in it.

Seriously, there’s the aforementioned werewolves, but also a lesbian meet-cute, a Navy SEAL and an ex-prostitute, a snarky political intern and his surly boss, a hunky contractor and his gun-shy employer, and a youngish professor who butts heads with a dog groomer (who has a corgi!).

If I’ve learned anything over the course of editing Silver & Gold, it’s that having a drink with my boss is a habit I clearly need to develop.


[READ AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT]

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AMANDA JEAN is a publicist for Alternating Current Press and the LGBT+ Director for The Spark. She is also an editor (and writer) of LGBTQ romance, and when not wrangling manuscripts, she can be found watching space documentaries, looking at pictures of shoes, and attempting to read for pleasure. She has worked with Less Than Three Press, Torquere Press, NineStar Press, Siren BookStrand, Athgo International, The Typewriter, and the Seattle-based literary magazine POPLORISH, and has paid her dues writing dreary freelance content.

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Reckoning
RUSTY BARNES

Fiction  |  Novel
239 pages
5” x 7” perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1-934513-45-3
First Edition
Sunnyoutside
Buffalo, New York
Available HERE
$16.00
Review by Al Kratz

While I was reading Reckoning, by Rusty Barnes, I had a repetitive thought: There are a lot of really good small press books! This thought wasn’t necessarily a discovery. Since you have come to a small press blog to read a small press book review, it’s likely not shocking to you, either, but I think it bears repeating. There are a lot of really good small press books! Along with this idea, I’m struck by how easy it would be to miss reading a book like Reckoning if I limited my reading selection to Amazon recommendations or to reviews coming out of New York. I reckon this gives the indie reader an additional duty. The indie book thrives on the word of mouth, the Goodreads review, the Twitter mentions—the buzz. It’s a little extra effort, but the reader’s return on investment is a stronger network and a decreased chance that we’ll miss good books.

Reckoning is a good book that I’m glad I didn’t miss. It’s a tense coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old boy named Richard Logan who lives in a small, rural, Appalachian town. It begins with Richard in his typical world: working on a farm bringing in hay, dealing with the expectations of his father, and spending time with friends. His typical world quickly changes when his friends and he find an unconscious woman in the woods. This woman, Misty, turns out to be friends with the mother of Richard’s friend, Katie. The story is about them helping Misty, which leads to them having to deal with the villain, Lyle, the sociopathic son of the farmer who hired Richard.

Barnes delivers the story in a matter-of-fact style that lets the action speak for itself. He builds a world that is harsh and relentless, and the reader is compelled to understand it and to find out what will happen to Richard. The evil in his world is often hinted and out of reach. He could let it go, but he’s drawn to addressing it. He chases it and, most of the time, misses it until it occasionally appears and slaps him around. The writing is reminiscent of Daniel Woodrell classics such as Winter’s Bone or Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir. They all create rural, criminal worlds that are dangerous to the innocent, just via their proximity. Knowing what the criminals are doing in the shadows is enough to get you in trouble. Reckoning establishes its noir with a little more subtlety than Woodrell’s work. Barnes doesn’t need to label it, or use it for shock value—he lets his world unfold more naturally. It’s not until resolution of the main conflict that the full nature of what’s going on in this world is known. The reader learns along with Richard.

The coming-of-age portion of the story contains the classic issues for a growing boy: sexuality, masculinity, freedom, and morality all challenge the protagonist. Like the classic Bowie song, “Changes,” Richard is quite aware of what he’s going through. When Katie says her ex-boyfriend doesn’t fit in in the town as well as Richard does, he shares his perspective on why:

That’s the way things work. Everyone else tells you your place in the world, and you agree with it or not, and that’s how a life gets built. On what somebody else thinks of you.

(p. 80)

Like most teenagers, he makes mistakes, some of which are cringeworthy. Richard is drawn to the older woman, Misty, and he is confused about his feelings for Katie. He is both attracted to and repelled from her, mostly because he doesn’t understand either feeling. He doesn’t like this position, and he resigns to the fact that the only way to get to understanding is to grow up.

Being immature physically also presents challenges in his interactions with men. He’s in the awkward in-between age, and it limits him from helping his father with certain types of manual labor, and it limits his ability to handle physical confrontations with Lyle. He wants to run away from these challenges; he wants to be free, but his sense of justice draws him to find closure regardless of what it might cost him.

He knew dogs could go bad. Humans could, even more easily, and Richard wondered if he had it in him to go bad. He thought of Lyle’s breath in his face and the ache in his right arm. Misty and Kate and Mrs. Neary flashed into his head, and he thought maybe he could do it. He just needed to figure out how.

(p. 108)

These coming-of-age issues converge as the plot takes the group to a resolution of finding out what Lyle is doing. A now-more-mature 14-year-old is ready to complete his journey.

He was just a kid, but he deserved to have a chance to get back at Lyle, to make it better in his head. It wasn’t revenge. It was doing what needed to be done. It was everything he’d been taught in school and by his father and by all the men in the world who truly cared what kind of person he would become.

(p. 199)

This convergence leads to a reckoning for Lyle and Richard who are each called to account for the impacts of their actions. Richard has to face what he has done during his push to stop Lyle. What it has cost the people around him. This impact on Richard gives the story its strength, takes it beyond noir, and makes it an indie read easy to recommend.

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Al Kratz is our Fiction Reviewer for The Volt. He is a writer from Des Moines, Iowa, an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel, and is currently working on a novel and a short story collection. He has had work featured in Red Savina Review, Wyvern Lit, Flash Flood, Daily Palette, Apeiron Review, Ardor Flash Fiction, 1000words, Gravel, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere, and he is the winner of the 2013 British Fantasy Society Flash Fiction Competition.

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• This book was purchased by Alternating Current from the author at an AWP event. The reviewer does not know the author and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

Easiest if I Had a Gun
MICHAEL GERHARD MARTIN

Fiction  |  Stories
135 pages
5” x 8” Perfect-bound trade paperback
ISBN 978-0-692-29400-0
First Edition
Review Copy: Paperback
Alleyway Books
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Available HERE
$16.00
Review by Laura Citino

The title of this collection is only one answer to a question asked again and again in its pages: How do we take control of lives that are small, insignificant, painful, impossible? For some characters, it would be easiest if they had a gun, or a friend, or a steady job. For others, the answer lies elsewhere. Michael Gerhard Martin’s debut collection, including the winner of the 2013 James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, “Shit Weasel Is Late for Class,” tells nine stories of agency and survival in difficult circumstances.

The characters in these stories, downtrodden and scrappy as they appear on the surface, are all deeply wounded in some way. They organize and shuffle themselves around this wound, which often manifests itself as a lack: of parental approval, of love, of hope. They skirt around this lack like a gaping hole in their living room floor. In “Made Just for Ewe!” a woman in a racist small town becomes obsessed with the tiny angel figurines she makes and sells at craft shows, and she is hardly the only one overly invested in the production of kitsch. The high school senior at the center of “Bridgeville” tries to hold on to the love—or at least, lust—of his short life after she goes to college and experiences things he can hardly imagine in his beat-up, working-class town.

One of the strongest stories in this collection is also the shortest. In “The Strange Ways People Are,” a woman takes care of her hospice-ridden father, with whom she has had a tumultuous relationship most of her life. As his mind fades, he starts to forget who Elsie is, and latches on to the mistaken perception that his daughter is actually his deceased wife, Elsie’s mother. Elsie observes this moment with an almost detached interest, as if she’s a little afraid to know what it might mean:

When we’re alone sometimes, I’m my mother and we are on vacation. At first it was hard because I miss her too, in spite of everything. Then it was easy, because I feel like a mother again taking care of him. It’s strange. That isn’t lost on me.

(p. 15)

As happens in many of these stories, it is fascinating to watch Elsie eventually find comfort in the strange sadness of her life. She uses her father’s delusion to get him to say the things she’s been wanting him to say her whole life: namely, that he approves of her choice to go to college and to be an independent woman. Of course, her self-awareness hurts her even more, as she says:

“I realize I am forty-six years old and playing dress-up for a senile old man who can afford to make promises like a politician.”

(p. 20).

A family of three sits at the center of “You Gotta Know When to Hold Em.” Our narrator’s father embraces the lifestyle of dirt and hard times created by work at the refinery; he’s an uncouth character who burps, farts, and makes crude jokes to survive his circumstances. The mother, on the other hand, tries to maintain her humanity through ignorance. She covers herself in perfume, wearing:

“a ton of it because she was paranoid about smelling like gas.”

(p. 40)

She turns a blind eye, holds her nose, and implores her son to stay out of the junkyard. Though the narrator follows his own storyline, he is more of an observational character, and the simple clarity with which he observes the crumbling of his parents’ marriage is honest and heartbreaking.

The source of all this downheartedness is, in the tradition of classic American short story writing, the towns and factories where these characters reside. Most of these stories explicitly reference small town Pennsylvania; mentions abound of oil refineries, working-class bars, and struggling public schools. The stage is set beautifully throughout. The opening of “Even the Dust” is an excellent example of this:

We took 195 down along the river past the airport and got off in Eddystone. I was quiet. I’d lost my job, and Dick was throwing me some laborer’s stuff, some nasty, dirty under-the-table demolition work in an abandoned foundry. There were chemicals involved, a huge, terrifying plastic tank bearing a sign in red foot-high letters (DANGER ACID), buckets and bins of caustics, black barrels marked with ominous symbols. And marijuana flowing through us like the lie that adversity makes you stronger. We were strong. The first hit of the day is sometimes the most important.

(p. 51)

It’s clear that setting is key. However, I felt like much of my understanding of place in this collection came from my own limited knowledge of Pennsylvania. “Ilka, Ilsa, Kostas, and Pie,” a voice-driven monologue about an old German restaurateur, was entertaining to read, but after so many place-specific hints and slang, I was ready for more context. The emphasis on place and the similarities between these characters made me read this almost like a linked collection or cycle of stories, and I found myself yearning for a stronger sense of that foundation throughout.

What sets this collection apart from familiar stories about hard factory work and harder home lives is the self-awareness of the characters. No one is fooling himself here, not even the kids. As they figure out how to cope with their lives, everyone knows it’s all just a Band-Aid. “Seventy-Two Pound Fish Story,” for example, is a skillful depiction of the pathological lying most of us go through as kids. The sixth-grade narrator knows he’s lying, and he knows that the adults around him know he’s lying, but that’s still preferable to admitting the real pain underneath: the lack of affection and love from his father, who outsources father/son time to a colleague instead of taking his own son out fishing. The dialogue is done extremely well, revealing much while saying little:

Lute said, “What grade you in, Amazing?”
I said, “Sixth.” Then I added, “But they’re thinking of moving me up.”
He said, “You should be proud of that.”
I said, “I guess.” I was a straight B and C student who had a hard time sitting still. I also tended to get other kids in trouble a lot.
He said, “What do you wanna be when you grow up?”
I said, “That’s a tough one. I was thinking about being a doctor, a surgeon, but everyone says that would be a waste of my I.Q.”
He looked out over the water.

(p. 62)

From the other stories in this collection, we can guess that this kid might not ever get the love from his father, or from any adult male, that he wishes. It doesn’t mean he’s going to stop lying. It’s the one thing that gives him a promise of a better life. For him, like many others in Easiest if I Had a Gun, the hope is worth the pain.

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Laura Citino is a Staff Book Reviewer for The Volt. She is originally from southeastern Michigan and currently teaches English and writes in Terre Haute, Indiana. Laura received her MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University in Spokane, Washington, and attended Western Michigan University for undergraduate, where she studied creative writing and German. Her fiction and nonfiction has been published online and in journals such as Midwestern Gothic, Passages North, Bluestem, and Sou’Wester, and she has previously served as a regular contributor for Bark.

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• This book was given by the publisher to an Alternating Current staffer at AWP for review purposes. The reviewer does not know the publisher or the author and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

Get a Job: Santiago as Fisherman
NICK MAZMANIAN

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Part 3 in a series where Nick Mazmanian examines the occupations of fictional characters and whether or not they’ve excelled at their chosen fields. [Read Parts 1 and 2.]

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Name: Santiago
Occupation: Fisherman

Santiago is a fisherman in the strictest sense of the word. He makes his living at it, but for 84 days he hasn’t done this very thing. Looking over the story of the formerly banned book, The Old Man and the Sea, many a reader would think that this evaluation is an open-and-shut case. Be that as it may, let us see if Santiago should keep his job.

1. PATIENCE

A fisherman must have patience when he is out at sea. Start fishing too soon and you scare the fish; too late, and you miss them completely. The fact that so many people hate doing this is why they stay away from it entirely. Fishing, while peaceful, isn’t for everyone.

Santiago has patience, almost too much. After 84 days of not catching anything, he should have moved on to another profession, like becoming a cobbler or maybe a social media manager.

2. STRENGTH

Leaving industrial fishing to the side, actually fighting a fish on a line takes a lot of strength. There’s a reason why most fishing line can hold 500 pounds. It’s because physics is a bitch, and that fish doesn’t want to go where so many have never returned.

Santiago fights this giant fish, single handedly, for three days. Three days! To train for something like that today would take weeks on a Shake Weight, because our modern bodies are spongy and soft.

3. LUCK

A fisherman can stack the odds in his favor by using technology to track the fish down and bait the hook, but no matter how many times he radars the water, he still might not catch a fish.

Santiago is carved from a slab of wood that was unlucky enough to be cut down in the first place and was sent to a mill to be made into boards, but the place burned down during the cutting process. Luck ran away from him like an atheist from church, and it was so bad that people from the village were afraid of catching it.

Should he keep his job? Verdict!

Santiago sure as hell should! Why? Because he is a fisherman in every sense of the word. Sure, he didn’t wind up being able to profit from the fish (spoilers), but he still caught it and brought it into town.

Now, get this man a Bass Pro Shop sponsorship and a tie-in video game!

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Nick Mazmanian is the author of Where Monsters Lie & Other Tales, and when he isn’t banging away at the keyboard writing stories or emptying his thoughts onto his website, Ironcladwords.com, he can be found working on a multitude of projects that range from video games to podcasts about Batman to YouTube shorts to adventuring into the wide world with his wife and dog. You can also find him on Twitter and Tumblr.

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A Conversation with Nolan Liebert
INTERVIEW BY LORI HETTLER

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To celebrate Be Kind to Editors Month, Staff Interviewer Lori Hettler sits down for a conversation with author and editor, NOLAN LIEBERT. Nolan edits Pidgeonholes, a webzine of experimental and international writing. He writes short fiction and poetry that can be found littering the Internet in places like freeze frame fiction, Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry, An Alphabet of Embers, and elsewhere. Interacting with authors, both new and established, is important to him, so feel free to harass him on Twitter at @nliebert or at @pidgeonholes. You can read more about him and his work at nolanliebert.wordpress.com.

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LORI HETTLER: We totally met on Twitter, like, a day ago. At the risk of sounding incredibly cheesy, do you hang out there often?

NOLAN LIEBERT: I hang out on Twitter quite a bit, sometimes as myself, sometimes as @pidgeonholes. I spend quite a bit of time catching up on writing news I’ve missed while busy with work or my family.

Darn those family people and jobs that keep us away from socializing online! What do you do for a day job?

I work in the IT industry, so generally, I spend days getting my wires crossed. During the school year, I also volunteer as a youth soccer coach.

IT and coaching soccer. And then you moonlight as Editor-in-Chief for Pidgeonholes Magazine. How do you manage the whole work/life balance?

I have a great support team. My wife, Sara, and our kids largely work and school from home, so the house is always in order. This gives us more time together to unwind when I’m home, whether it’s a hike on one of the many trails here in the Black Hills, or binge-watching Doctor Who or something on Netflix. Additionally, I have a great staff coming on next month at Pidgeonholes to help with reading, which should allow me more time to put together even more beautiful quarterly volumes, find funding to pay authors, and do some more writing of my own.

Ah, binge-watching on Netflix, everyone’s guilty pleasure! When was Pidgeonholes born? What literary gap(s) do you think it fills?

Pidgeonholes launched in January 2015, so we’re coming up on our one-year anniversary. A lot was weighed and considered regarding what gap(s) such a publication should fill. Ultimately, I wanted to publish works I felt were underrepresented—microfiction and micropoetry, experimental works, and works from international and diverse authors. I have a soft spot for micro works; we’re actually doing a feature on them throughout November. In such a socially-connected world, I find it incredibly important to publish works people can read on a tube ride or a smoke break or in the limited time they get to themselves at home, works that can be read quickly but digested long after. If there’s one positive thing Twitter has taught us, I would like to think it’s how to provide more impact in fewer words across a variety of subject matter.

Are you a writer, as well? Do you find your writing to be similar to, or much different from, that which you publish at Pidgeonholes?

I do write, a fair mix of poetry and fiction. For the most part, I would say what I produce is in the same vein as what I’m interested in publishing. Most of my work scattered around the Internet is short and experimental, and a lot of the work I currently have on submission deals with diversity issues. I’ve found during my editorial process that I’ve been able to connect with not just great writers, but great writers who produce work I want to read elsewhere, not just because it’s similar in style but because it takes risks. It’s important to me in both capacities, as an editor and as a writer, to support the other writers and small zines trying to make it out there. Structo had a great idea this month to require a photograph of a recently purchased zine, paper or electronic, in order to submit—as an editor, I think this is a great way to show solidarity within both the publishing and writing communities, and as a writer, I think this is a brilliant alternative to regular reading fees.

Sorry, that one got away from me a little...

I like that idea, too, not just from a “covering the submission fees” perspective, but because it shows they are familiar with your publication and they aren’t just submitting blindly on a wish and a hope. Would it be too weird to ask which piece or author you were most stoked to publish at Pidgeonholes?

Honestly, I’m most stoked when I learn Pidgeonholes will be someone’s first publication or acceptance. To be the one to give a new writer her break is an honor. Other than that, I’m thrilled to be publishing all the authors in our 90s Mixtape special volume later this month.

If you could solicit any writer, living or dead, to write a piece for the magazine, who would it be?

As for solicitations, that’s hard. To me, soliciting work can be a process that excludes so many writers. That said, I would love to have the opportunity to promote the works of people like Natalia Theodoridou or Vajra Chandrasekera, who I think have important things to say.

Tell me more about the 90s Mixtape special volume!

This is something I’m really excited about! Earlier this year, I put out a call for submissions inspired by 90s music. The response was overwhelming, and from well over 100 submissions, I chose ten stories, about the same length as a typical 90s album. The stories run from humor to social commentary, from literary to science fiction. Music has been something that has connected people across generations, and the music of this decade really affected Generation X and The Millennials, both. The represented authors range from their 20s to their 50s and hail from the US, Canada, and the UK. The volume is my way of trying to reconnect people in an age where we are so often separated from each other by politics and phone screens. The stories will appear on the Pidgeonholes website throughout September, alongside our regular publications, and will be released in a special volume for download and reading on Issuu at the end of the month.

Since it’s Be Kind to Editors Month, are there any editors you’d want to give a shout-out to? Was there one in particular who inspired you to start your own mag? Or one who’s doing something fresh or interesting that’s caught your eye?

I was originally inspired by Dino Laserbeam during my time reading for freeze frame fiction. I’m also a big fan of the work being done by Brian Lewis and Empire & Great Jones Little Press, who publish Spark: A Creative Anthology and Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things, and recently put George Wells’ Managing Editor’s chair up for a new venture, Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry. I’m excited to watch the growth and progress of a number of other zines, like the brand new Indianoa Review, the risk-taking Lockjaw Magazine, and the fledgling surrealist journal, Peculiar Mormyrid. So many great projects out there! Really. This is what Twitter is for—finding new things to explore constantly. I do my best to highlight editors and journals doing great things each #FollowFriday.

What’s your favorite—

Piece of short fiction written by someone else? Oh, wow... I read a lot of beautiful work. This year my favorite pieces have included the likes of Ani King’s “Conjugate ‘to be,’ using complete sentences,” or Alexis A. Hunter’s “Be Not Unequally Yoked,” or Natalia Theodoridou’s “Android Whores Can’t Cry.”

Piece of short fiction written by you? As for my own work, my favorite pieces have yet to find homes. But, thinking about what’s out in the wild, I think “Oil and Cherries” is probably my favorite, along with my piece, “The Swing, Or How to Ricochet According to Sylvia Plath,” forthcoming in An Alphabet of Embers.

Place to get your editing on? I edit from the left side of my antique sofa. Usually surrounded by our family’s cats and with the dog snoring by my feet.

Word in the English language? My favorite word in English... Petrichor? I love the fresh rain smell, and think the phonetics here capture that complexity. Phosphenes? It’s nice to have a word to describe the lights we see when we rub our eyes. Lots of words invented over at The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Word in any language? My favorite word in any language is probably “luftmensch,” a Yiddish term derived from the German words for “air” and “human.” Its translations range from “daydreamer” to “someone more concerned with intellectual pursuits than practical work.” This is tied with “hiraeth,” a Welsh term for a home you can no longer return to or that never existed.

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Lori Hettler is our Chief Staff Interviewer and handles our interview series for The Inductor. Lori founded the book blog, independent press resource community, and book club The Next Best Book Club (TNBBC) in 2007. An advocate for the small press and self-publishing communities, she has been featured from coast to coast, in both The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Portions of her reviews have been quoted for a number of books (most notably in the press release for Graywolf Press’ I Curse the River of Time, Red Hen Press’ catalog for David Maine’s An Age of Madness, and Heather Fowler’s Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness). Formerly the Marketing Director for Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (CCLaP), Lori has now begun to take on freelance work under TNBBC Publicity. When she’s not curled up on the couch with a good book, you can find Lori on Twitter, TNBBC’s blog, Goodreads, and Facebook talking about it.

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Not on Fire, Only Dying
SUSAN RUKEYSER

Fiction  |  Novel
280 Pages
5½” x 8½” Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-1-940189-10-9
First Edition
Review Copy: PDF ARC
Twisted Road Publications
Tallahassee, Florida, USA
Available HERE
$17.00
Review by Al Kratz

In the opening of Susan Rukeyser’s debut novel, Not on Fire, Only Dying, high stakes are established when a woman reports her baby is missing. As the scene develops, it becomes clear there is more to everyone’s story. Lola, the mother reporting the incident, is very troubled, and the people she’s come to for help don’t even know she had a baby. Everyone has to face the possibility that it’s another one of her delusions. The only thing they are completely sure of is they want to help her.

The police are skeptical. They judge her on the surface stereotypes that are on the minds of her friends. Her biggest supporter is Marko, a drug dealing ex-con of Romani descent. For the most part, Marko becomes the driving character of the novel and the heartbeat of this unique and gritty story. He is dedicated to Lola and loyal to Mary, the owner of a salvage store where Lola first comes in for help. It’s shown early in the story that if he’s a man who has to protect, he might also be a man who has to attack.

His legs come scissoring out of a full-length oilskin duster. Black coattails sail out behind. Marko knows that when he moves, he becomes something dark and sharply angled. The decades have carved shadows behind his eyes and beneath his cheekbones. His brow is a frenzy of lines. He is frightening, maybe to the delicate.

(p. 12).

The quick and concise detail of that last sentence is a good sample of how this story is so effectively told. It’s never forced. There always is a confident ease to its flow. Susan Rukeyser obviously knew how she had to tell this story.

Most of the action takes place in the shabby Hudson Valley town of Schendenkill. Before the day of the incident, Lola had only recently been back from living in New York City. This explains the group being unsure of her status as a new mother, but it also provides a place for Marko’s quest. Lola says the father of the baby is a man in New York City, named Daniel. Marco becomes obsessed with him, not out of jealousy, but by the motive of learning more about what has happened with Lola.

Mary becomes a good friend of Marko’s and draws out some of his past. This is the only time that the book dives into backstory when Marko tells her the specifics of his criminal history and spends some time remembering his Romani upbringing. This shows what has centered Marco as an outsider and is highlighted by this memory:

His mother replied, “Outsiders are tolerated here, sure. And, yes, that is much better than persecution. But it’s not the same as belonging.”

(p. 82).

Mary also serves as a measure of how far people are willing to go with Lola’s story and when they need to give up on it. Her salvage business is appropriate subtext for their lives as old junk no one else wants to save or to buy.

Marko and Lola have a Sid-and-Nancy quality. It seems they are capable of any type of failure and spend most of their lives on the extremes. At times, they are the kind of magnets that repel, while other times they are the ones that attract. The title, which comes from an expression people used to describe a scenic trail in the Hudson Valley:

Hiking alone is discouraged. Someone must be nearby in case you swoon. Someone must remind you that the land you are on is not on fire, only dying. Gently as it’s meant to.”

(p. 35),

also summarizes the connection between these two characters. They are nearby for each other when they swoon. They remind each other what is real and what is not. With all of these tasks, they have variable rates of success. With this story, the reverse phrase could also be in play: Not dying, only on fire.

Throughout their struggles, they aren’t always sympathetic characters, but they certainly are compelling. When Lola reports her baby missing, she is very upfront with including the detail that she had left him in a stroller outside a bar. Marko considers Lola “his girl” even though, at first, it seems Lola hardly knows him. I think the author makes them compelling not only by not hiding their weaknesses, but also by not overstating them or making a writerly show of being edgy. The characters just are what they are. Lola is very self-aware of the problem she presents:

Better to call them: Let’s Hope, Why Not, If It Shuts You Up. I tell you, Marko, no pill dissolves faster than a doctor’s interest when there are no signs of improvement. I never stabilized. I’m a disappointment at best.

(p. 75).

Readers end up facing the same dilemma that Marko and Mary do. We can forgive Lola if she did leave a baby outside the bar because, regardless of the validity of her story, it’s clear she needs help. Once we get past her doing what none of us would do to our babies, two situations are possible: She is making her baby up, or her baby has been kidnapped. Either one is a case of her needing serious help. The suspense is guaranteed, but the lengths to which Marko goes to help Lola also makes for a sweet and compelling love story. It’s about intimacy against almost impossible odds:

Nighttime, finally, and once again Lola lies in his arms, as if this isn’t extraordinary, as if he never doubted he’d hold her again, as if she was never lost to him, a stranger sneering at his affection. They’re fully clothed, and Marko doesn’t care if that never changes. It’s enough, having her settled back against him, not poised to flee.

(p. 92).

Marko continues his search for the truth into winter. He navigates doubts, his own bendable moral codes, and his precarious love for Lola. Getting there is a suspenseful page-turner that earns its ending. As it starts its descent to the final act, Lola and Marko have a fitting exchange about endings:

“People like happy endings,” she says, returning to her work.
“Not all people,” he insists. “Some of us just want real ones.”

(p. 183).

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Al Kratz is our Fiction Reviewer for The Volt. He is a writer from Des Moines, Iowa, an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel, and is currently working on a novel and a short story collection. He has had work featured in Red Savina Review, Wyvern Lit, Flash Flood, Daily Palette, Apeiron Review, Ardor Flash Fiction, 1000words, Gravel, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere, and he is the winner of the 2013 British Fantasy Society Flash Fiction Competition.

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• This book was submitted to the reviewer by the author at the reviewer’s request. The reviewer has had brief interactions with the author on social media, but does not know the author or the publisher personally. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

Labour of Love, Vol. 35: Winter Bluffs
VARIOUS AUTHORS

Poetry; short prose
44 pages
5 1/8” x 7 5/8” Saddle-stapled, high-gloss, full-color magazine
ISSN 1192-621X
First Edition of ~400
Labour of Love
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Available HERE
Free; donations or Canadian postage appreciated
Review by Cetoria Tomberlin

Brevity is the word that keeps coming to mind as I read through the pages of Labour of Love. For the most part, the journal seems to specialize in short-form poetry. This isn’t a criticism, of course, because it is clearly a deliberate decision on the editor’s part. These pieces are clipped and biting and their intent is to take direct aim at their subject matter.

The cover art is entitled, “Winter Bluffs,” and, like the season itself, invokes a quiet grief for that which is dead or dying. These poems are dealing with things the speakers have either lost or wish to lose, be it another person, pain, anger, or self-respect.

In the poem, “Itch,” by Duncan Armstrong, the speaker details his addiction to another person. The obsessiveness of the speaker’s inability to forget, or at least to move on from, a past relationship is painfully felt. Instead of a resolution, the poem ends with a resignation:

I got that itch
you know the one
that can only be scratched
by your tongue

(p. 27).

One of my favorite pieces within the journal is “That Messiah Moment” by Raymond K. Avery. The poem can be read with or without a sense of humor. Either way, it works. The speaker sets the scene of an audition, heavy religious undertones, that ends with:

The competitors stood before them
Each holding his own wooden cross
While Judas asked the tie-break question
That he knows no one can answer

(p. 33).

The journal also has a lot working for it in terms of appearance. The cover and pages within feature skilled artwork, some photography, some paintings. The text throughout is not positioned uniformly, but is done in a way that adds to the aesthetic, instead of taking away from (no easy feat to accomplish when playing around with page layouts). One point of mystery, however, is the page numbers. They begin like normal, but then stop and appear later, but not in the correct numerical order. I suspect a format editing error, but it really is quite noticeable given the numbers that do make an appearance are at the top center of the pages. There are also no author biographies within the journal, which I would have liked to have seen.

A good number of the poems are dedicated to sound, always a key feature in poetry, I believe. Some actually use a blatant amount of rhyming. At first, I found it a bit jarring to see so many hard-end rhymes, but after reading the journal as a whole, I think their selection was intentional as something rare and unique in a modern journal. I’m not sure if it had the hoped-for effect, but it was different to see in a collection of modern poetry, and it’s good to know that there’s a home for rhyming poems, too, as many journals nowadays won’t print them. Overall, I think the publication is doing some interesting things and would like to see more from them in the future.

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Cetoria Tomberlin is a Staff Book Reviewer and a poet and fiction writer who lives in Northwest Georgia. She received her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Berry College. Her work has previously appeared in Fairy Tale Review, NonBinary Review, Southern Women’s Review, The Battered Suitcase, Spires, and online at LADYGUNN and HelloGiggles. She is also a book reviewer for Mixed Diversity Reads.

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• This book was submitted to Alternating Current by the publisher. The reviewer does not know the publisher and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter
JEANNINE HALL GAILEY

Poetry
78 pages
6” x 9” Paperback
ISBN 978-1-936419-42-5
First Edition
Review Copy: Paperback
Mayapple Press
Woodstock, New York, USA
Available HERE
$15.95
Review by L. A. Lanier

In her fourth book of poetry, Jeannine Hall Gailey takes readers on a haunting journey through a past often forgotten: America’s reigning “Atomic City.”

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter weaves tales of a seemingly innocent farm life and the wonderment of a home no longer standing. However, while simple pleasures like climbing trees and horseback riding are mentioned, a harsher reality unfolds by the collection’s examination into the lives of those involved with nuclear research.

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter is more than a title, though. She becomes the metaphorical lens through which some of the hardest tales are told. Whether she is seeking to understand her differences or suffering through conditions beyond her control, her voice is distinct. Gailey’s choices in narrative challenge readers by making them question which pieces are pulled from her own life, as a robotics professor’s daughter, or from her imagination. Her exploration into the residual effects of radiation is, at times, despairing. Needless to say, all these aspects keep the work engaging.

[...] her mother has started calling her morbid.

As a child she studied the Latin names for diseases, [...]
[...] This cannot end well,
her mother thought; she had encouraged playing
with other children, the joys of tag.

But instead [...]
[...] She puts leaves in her hair
and collects fossils, lining them up to spell words,
the swirling trilobite, the imprints of the mysterious dead.

(from “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [morbid],” p. 16)

[...] Carbon-based structures,
we absorb from the water, from the air,
from our food, from our walls,
from our parks and fishing ponds.

We absorb and our body says:
it is good.

(from “Elemental,” p. 42)

Gailey claims to have spent several years researching for this book, and it shows. From the pieces focusing on families compensated and swearing secrecy to scientific terminologies illuminating her imagery, there is a solid balance, and overlap, of science and fiction.

[...] Not the children
dying of leukemia quietly in hospitals funded
by government grants, uncounted because
their numbers might be damning.

[...] They’ve signed away the lives of their families
on government papers. They do not discuss cancer
at the breakfast table. They might suffer and die,
but they do so in respectable silence. [...]

(from “They Do Not Need Rescue,” p. 71)

The erudition of the work is neither arrogant nor written in a way that feels alienating to readers for their lack of knowledge. One does not need to have taken a recent Chemistry course to understand the various elements she mentions. Like Cesium which, from the opening poem, readers learn (or are reminded) “[...] Burns Blue.” If anything, it may instill a desire in readers to brush up on the science or conduct their own research into the history of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Several themes reoccur throughout the collection that could seem repetitive to some, but given the nature of the book, returning to select concepts makes sense. Her writing does not come across as trying to milk these themes. In fact, each piece conveys an interesting tale, perspective, or further exploration into the life of a scientist and his daughter that enhances the overall tone of the work.

America’s past is not the only topic of interest. Gailey touches on some of the nuclear disasters from abroad, e.g. Chernobyl and Fukushima. Doing so provides an even wider scope of the implications of nuclear gone wrong. Final verdict? It is difficult to stop reading after each poem. The Robot Scientist’s Daughter is not only well written, but well executed and worthy of any poetry lover’s time.

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L. A. Lanier is a Publicist for Alternating Current Press and a Staff Book Reviewer for The Volt. She is an emerging writer focusing on the mastery of micro/flash fiction and dabbling in poetry. While a bachelor’s in Sociology didn’t quite lend itself to creative writing, she incorporates elements of her studies into her work, one piece of which can be found on Paragraph Planet. If you enjoy her reviews or wish to know more, feel free to visit her site and follow her on Twitter at @TheSquibbler (She assures both are more interesting than this bio.).

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• This book was sent to Alternating Current from the author. The reviewer does not know the author or the publisher. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •