August 11, 2015
“These stories provide a steady drift through the place that all readers, at least for a short time, have visited: the place of despair. Where the reader meets the text is the place where that experience floats, steady, even, without too much upset, without too much rocking to and fro—a steady movement from one story to the next carrying, carrying, carried to the end.
It’s here that place and psyche, geography and emotion, and time and desire have been blurred and muddled, in the same way that they do as they lay in wait to be plucked from the abyss of memory and brought into present time, together again; clear, coherent, resolved.
Akin to the steady tension present in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, we wait, we wait, and read and read some more, hoping for that elusive resolution that will dispel despair and reinvigorate an existence no longer subjugated by “place.” Readers can reflect that place is located, perhaps, only in the imagination.”
– Kelly Lydick, Drunken Boat