dawn west

Tell Everyone I Said Hi by Chad Simpson (A Review by Dawn West)

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University of Iowa Press

124 pgs/$16.00

I was born and raised and still live in Ohio. As a Midwest girl, I can say that Chad Simpson’s earnest yet tough story collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi does the region right. Simpson’s emotionally complex characters live in Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, and they’re all aching with this bruised hope, this blue yearning. They could be people we love. They could be us.

In one of the first stories, “You Would’ve Counted Yourself Lucky,” we meet a pre-teen playing with a flashlight in his backyard, waiting for his missing sister. Before he ventures outside the boy passes by his parents, who don’t notice him at all.

         In the living room, the boy’s mom holds her drink in the air and says in this defeated way to the boy’s dad, “Could you maybe just add a couple ice cubes to this?”

The boy’s dad rises from his chair and says, “Sure.”

We meet the boy at a pivotal time in his life. We all know puberty is a total douchebag—add to that his distracted parents and his presently-missing sister. This boy is terrifically curious and lacerated with loneliness. We follow him into the oddly intimate encounter he has with the once-beautiful teen girl next door, who is partially paralyzed because of a car accident.

          Rebecca picks up the boy’s fingers again and moves his hand down her leg to her calf. There is a divot the size and shape of a small football where doctors have taken skin at the back of her calf, and she sets his fingers inside it. The skin there is cool and completely hairless. It feels smooth in a way that skin shouldn’t. Continue reading →

May We Shed These Human Bodies, by Amber Sparks (A Review by Dawn West)

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Curbside Splendor

150 pgs/ $12.00

Welcome to the cabaret. Amber Sparks’ May We Shed These Human Bodies is a menagerie of twisted fairy tales, ghost stories, and wild fables. Her stories are often fantastical but her prose is almost scientifically precise. No muss, no fuss. Sparks is our fairy tale cartographer, mapping a world of modern magic and human error.

We begin with Death and the People, a darkly comic fable. Death comes for one of them, and the people stand up to him and say no. “If he goes, they said, then we all go.” Death, who is one suave son of a bitch, looking “tall and elegant and kind of preppy in a crisp white button-down and chinos,” gives in.”You all have to come with me, then.” This story is both humorous and poignant. The people are irrational, insatiable; a chorus of gaping maws, like we really are.

I love how Sparks takes the most surreal characters and renders them tangible- making us empathize with Death, for example. The feral children, the cannibalistic seniors, the trees who become people, the wives who become animals, a big City hungering for mobility, a legion of ghosts- they are all hoarding desires, even the dictator drinking alone,”watching Shane and weeping into a glass of whiskey.” Continue reading →

Living Arrangements by Laura Maylene Walter (A Review by Dawn West)

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BkMk Press 

175 pgs/$12

Laura Maylene Walter’s Living Arrangements is a collection of finely honed stories, all deeply concerned with place and memory. Her stories are quietly resonant–beneath the everyday veneer of each of her characters, Walter clarifies their internal tempests; their struggles with identity and belonging, desire and grief. I’m proud to say Walter is also a heartland lady, living an afternoon car ride away from me in Lakewood, Ohio.

Her book opens with “you,” years ago, when “you” were “a newborn, a wrinkled girl confined to your crib, the high chair, the stroller,” in the book’s opener, the titular Living Arrangements. I was immediately taken in by this second person narration, this plain focused care. The story Living Arrangements takes us through the life of a woman, to each of the places and times that hold magic for her, that are still sharp, years later, the living arrangements almost characters themselves, the way places that have held us can become in our minds. I simply cannot narrow down my choices for a quote, so you will just have to trust me. It’s badass.

The vast majority of Walter’s protagonists are women and girls, but her male protagonist in The Ballad Solemn of Lady Molena is a true marvel. It is always hard for me to pick favorites (see above), but The Ballad Solemn of Lady Molena may be the crowning jewel of this debut.

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