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 →