[REVIEW] Bloomland by John Englehardt

(Dzanc, 2019)

REVIEW BY DAVID TROMBLAY

Bloomland, the winner of the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, explores the cyclic American cultural phenomenon of an all too real mass shooting set at a fictionalized southern university nestled in an evangelical stronghold where God and guns are routinely spoken of in the same breath and with the same reverence. Though the setting is masterfully crafted and given intimate nuance by Englehardt, Bloomland could also have the thinnest veil dragged across its pages and become Anytown, USA, all too easily unnervingly. Therein lies the first of countless gripping details waiting between the novel’s pages. Englehardt strikes at the unfortunately understood universality of this story by whispering to the psyche of the reader, saying, “this is what real endings look like, after anxiety erodes into routine.

This conversation—which has spent too much time in the mouths of talking heads following the week’s latest and greatest presumably unavoidable tragedy—is examined through the unfolding lives of a trio of characters including a student struggling to find a life of which they are willing to subscribe to, a widowed professor, and young man who is made listless by an emptiness and unknown yearning which he sets out to eradicate at any cost. The cost is interrogated by a trinity of narrators who attempt to talk the three characters through the descriptive, prescriptive, and speculative, events that led up to, unraveled during, and followed that fateful day.

“Later I understand you’re opening up to me, telling the story of your life like it happened to someone else, like the things you’ve experienced are not singular, but part of a cycle that is always repeating and reinventing itself.”

Englehardt employs these second-person narrators expertly while reminding the reader there is an “I” behind the tragedy to help usher the survivors who are left alive to move on afterward. Not doing so would be a grave mistake and no different than what America has been inundated with by the media following the endless string of mass shootings of recent history. By leading the reader through these knotted lives while using the “you” and “I,” Englehardt presents the question of who are “we” to sit back so apathetically and serve as an audience to what is quickly becoming history’s most grotesque spectator sport, leaving you to “…wonder if the scariest thing about all this is not that life can’t return to normal, but that it already has.”

It should not surprise readers that this book does not end with a cheery conclusion, but envelopes a meticulously scaffolded reflection of the current American society, one so willing to send thoughts and prayers when the time arises, yet simultaneously waiting for it to be their own turn, as if it is merely inevitable.

DAVID TROMBLAY is a native of Duluth, Minnesota. He served for 10 years in the U.S. Navy, deploying to Iraq, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He is currently studying English Literature and Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. His essays and short stories have appeared in Minerva Zine, The Nemadji Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. His first novel, The Ramblings of a Revenant, was published in 2015.

[REVIEW] Byrd, by Kim Church

Byrd

Dzanc Books

228 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

Kim Church’s debut novel Byrd is essentially a love story for a lost child. Its main character, Addie gives the child up for adoption after she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. The pregnancy is unintended and almost miraculous (you’ll have to read it yourself to find out why), but Addie never imagines keeping the baby. Giving him up, though, leaves a hole that Addie never quite fills. So she writes letters to her absent son, nursing “hopes but no expectations” that one day they might meet.

Spanning more than 20 years of Addie’s and birth-father Roland’s lives before and after the pregnancy, through alternating points of view, the book slowly leads us to understand why Addie feels unprepared for parenthood and why she neglects to tell Roland about the child until many years later. Inter-spliced throughout are poignant letters to Byrd, which is what Addie calls her child, intending it as “a name no one else would ever call you. One thing about you that would be only mine.” Continue reading

[REVIEW] Any Deadly Thing, by Roy Kesey

deadly
Dzanc Books

250 pages, $15.95

Review by Thomas Michael Duncan

Roy Kesey’s Any Deadly Thing spans more of the globe than any other collection in recent memory. The stories within these pages take place in Peru, Croatia, China, Paraguay, Paris, Louisiana, and much of northern California. A single story touches on Beijing, Guatemala, Mexico, and New York. It’s a departure from the trend of tying a collection of stories together through a common location or region, a decision that allows space for Kesey to demonstrate his versatile command over voice and language.

The collection begins with the story of a troubled, protective single father in the rural town of Fallash. He is a hardened, no nonsense man who works with his hands, and Kesey uses short, choppy sentences in plain English:

“Jay takes the bag, nods at the register girl, runs out to the truck. He gets home and already the dog is sitting up, licking at the air around his daughter’s face. He watches, looks. Haircut could have been worse. Dog’s got no collar but it’s clean, somebody’s for sure but nobody’s from around here close. He boils up the potatoes, fries some venison sausage, lets her feed a little to the dog. The rain stops. An okay day.”

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Could You Be With Her Now, Two Novellas by Jen Michalski (A Review by Sara Lippmann)

Dzanc

$15.95/ 180 pgs.

“The novella,” Ian McEwan writes, “is the perfect form of prose fiction.” And yet, McEwan laments in his short essay, ‘Some Notes on the Novella,’ published in The New Yorker last October, an overwhelming number of writers find themselves “slaves to the giant” i.e. the novel – “instead of masters of the form.”

Not so Jen Michalski.

Michalski, a Baltimore-based writer and editor, knows exactly what she is doing when it comes to choosing form to suit a particular narrative function. The author of two short story collections, From Here, and Close Encounters, her first novel, The Tide King won the 2012 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press this spring. In the meantime, last month Dzanc Books released Could You Be With Her Now, a stunning pair of disparate but resonant novellas that showcase not only her enormous range but also the form in its tidy splendor.

While on the surface these works seems worlds apart, emotionally the characters are united by loss, alienation, and their desire to be understood. At the center of it all is Michalski’s masterful hand, at once compassionate and unflinching, possessed of extraordinary, aesthetic restraint. What she has given us are two lean bodies of incredible depth and ambition. Compression wins out at every turn, so that each word feels integral, without sacrificing her tremendous ear for language. The umbrella title for the two novellas, Could You Be With Her Now, comes from a line in the second pertaining to a fleeting, fiery romance with a lover, long dead, and speaks to the ache of impossible love, a current that runs through both stories. Both novellas hinge on the feeling, expressed by Alice, a character from the second novella, May-September:  

Something had been lost, or taken, or was never hers to begin with, even though she realized with a ferocity that she had wanted it more than anything. Continue reading