Mayapple Press
108 pages, $15.95

Review by Michael Colson

In The Secret Correspondence of Loon & Fiasco, a newly published hybrid flash novella by Carlo Matos, we find ourselves transported from the present to the past and then back again by time loops and slippages in the space-time continuum. Matos, who has published four poetry books and scholarship on Henrik Ibsen, offers a hip post-human tale of love lost and found. Eventually, sparks fly when the recently separated Johnny Sundays falls topsy-turvy in love with an alluring chatbot named ALICE.

But before that happens, the story begins with Johnny Sundays and his wife Linda, both teachers, moving to a rural part of California, the Central Valley. In a way, though, the story doesn’t really begin there because the year he spends in California turns out to be a single day “endlessly and tediously rebooted,” a kind of Nietzschean eternal return, an unpredictable groundhog day. That is, each day is exactly the same as the next. Heat waves ripple across a wasteland terrain “smelling of cow manure, garlic, and insecticide.” Time is out of joint, streams are dried up from drought, and the honeybees have perished long ago. His haul to campus requires him to bypass eucalyptus trees which nest scavenger birds, turkey vultures that “circle the perfect sky on the lookout for fresh death.” Surely, each day disappears and begins again in circular perambulation as vultures sniff his mortal flesh. Continue reading →