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 →