[REVIEW] Range of Motion, by Meagan Cass

Range

Magic Helicopter Press

56 pages, $8

 

Review by Caitlin Corrigan

 

In Range of Motion, Megan Cass performs the magic trick of presenting the inner lives of an entire family with novelistic depth in less than 60 pages.  Less sleight of hand and more clown car chauffer, Cass’s gift for manipulating structure and detail creates a dense, but very readable collection of linked stories.

We begin with a flash fiction after poet Craig Raine’s “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.” In Cass’s version, the Martian is writing from a suburban summer in upstate New York, observing human rituals in all of their fleshy, sweaty glory: “They make the pilgrimage once a year, in that season when the heat blurs the trees in their yards, when they plug up their light squares with grey boxes, when they shout their language across fields that could almost be our surface, redbrown and dry.” The repeated “they” here is broad, but in the following stories, we move much closer, hovering above the more intimate rituals of a family riding the tide of their years together. Alcoholism, affairs, the unreliability of memory—these dark spirits of the American suburban psyche are all present in Cass’ debut chapbook, but there is also warmth, playfulness, and an attention to sound on the line level that elevates these stories beyond what, in lesser hands, could be mere Cheever mimicry for millennials. Continue reading

[REVIEW] The Skin Team, by Jordaan Mason

Cover Image of Jordaan Mason's The Skin Tteam

Magic Helicopter Press
$15.00/226 pgs.

Review by Denton Loving

Jordaan Mason is a Canadian filmmaker, musician (Jordaan Mason and the Horse Museum) and writer (with work in UNSAID, The Scrambler, Everyday Genius, NOÖ Journal, and red lightbulbs). His debut novel, The Skin Team, is a dream-like story about a two boys and a girl—a love triangle of sorts—that is shaped by intense violence and energetic forces beyond understanding. In The Skin Team, Mason explores a number of subjects that include the shifting border between love and sex, as well as the noise and force of energy. What happens when we absorb too much power? And what happens when the lights go out?

First, there is a sick boy called Synesthesia. He describes his sickness to his doctor like this: “my stomach is going blind, I can’t taste anything except ash, do you think that I swallowed fire while I was sleeping, is that possible.” What he doesn’t share with his doctor but “what should be noted is the level of exploration that would happen…i.e. how my body found many ways to experience the energy depending on where I was in relation to the building.” Continue reading