Caitlin Corrigan

[REVIEW] The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, by William Todd Seabrook

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Lewis

Rose Metal Press

Winner of the Eighth Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest

56 pages, $12

 

Review by Caitlin Corrigan

 

In a recent radio interview with Minnesota State University (MNSU), William Todd Seabrook described his latest, prize-winning chapbook, The Imagination of Lewis Carroll as both “magical realist biography” and a kind of “fan fiction of a historical person.” Seabrook, a PANK contributor, is also the author of two other prizewinning chapbooks of biography (on Joan of Arc and J. Robert Oppenheimer, respectively). His work toys with our ideas of cultural mythmaking, while also creating space for Seabrook to bring his own sense of playfulness to lives whose details have already been committed to our cultural memory, for better or worse.

In these two dozen flash vignettes, Seabrook mixes fact and fabulism to bring Lewis Carroll to life using spare, imaginative prose. Writes Michael Martone, judge for the Eight Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest, “Carroll, the logician and mathematician, saw language as an analog calculating machine. Seabrook recalibrates here, bringing to the language a digital elegance, the repeating replication, the algorithmic grace of aughts and ones.” The stories here are tight little delights, but Seabrook doesn’t shy away from probing some of the darker nuances of Carroll’s life. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Black Emerald, by Jeanne Thornton

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emerald

Instar Books
178 pages, ebook, $10

Review by Caitlin Corrigan

Jeanne Thornton’s collection of stories, The Black Emerald, is consistently smart, sometimes quite brilliant, and almost always just flat out fun.
Published in ebook form by Instar Books, this collection of two novellas and seven stories also contains a few illustrations drawn by Thornton, and is available in a variety of formats, including a slick looking emerald shaped flash drive. Instar Books is a new indie press slated to release four titles in 2015, and The Black Emerald, released in late 2014, is their debut effort. With a model that emphasizes transparency in book sales and electronic only publication, Instar explicitly seeks an alternative publishing model for authors and works that fall outside of mainstream tastes. Their website makes public the number of sales figures for each book, and offers Kickstarter-like perks that “unlock” once a certain number of copies have been sold. The first of these bonuses has already been revealed—a bizarro recording of the author singing “Born to Run”—but I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that these cats make it to 50,000 units, at which point they’ll purchase a ship called “The Black Emerald” and host panels and salons in cities across the world. (See? Way fun.) Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Range of Motion, by Meagan Cass

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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 →